


The Impossible Mission Affair (Expanded edition)

by AconitumNapellus



Category: Mission: Impossible (TV 1966), The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (TV)
Genre: Angst, Crossover, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Psychological Trauma, Rape, Soviet Union, gulag
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-21
Updated: 2017-12-21
Packaged: 2019-02-18 00:35:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 10
Words: 66,138
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13088745
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AconitumNapellus/pseuds/AconitumNapellus
Summary: When Jim Phelps is handed a mission that only a Russian can complete, he turns to Illya Kuryakin for help. Illya must take the place of a gay convict in the gulag, and retain his sanity so that his mission doesn't fail.This is much more focussed on Illya and Napoleon than on the MI team. Rated explicit for rape scenes. This is an expansion of my previous fic, with added chapters near the end. It seemed easier to re-post than to try to slot the extra chapters in.(Some references:http://slavamogutin.com/gay-in-the-gulag/http://gulaghistory.org/https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tricyclic_antidepressant )





	1. Chapter 1

Mr Waverly had a curious expression on his face as he spun the table towards his Number 2, Section 2 agent. Illya picked up the file as it halted in front of him, and opened it. It held a single photograph of a man he did not recognise, conventionally good looking, silver haired, with eyes every bit as blue as his own.

‘I – don’t recognise this man, sir,’ he admitted, turning the picture a little as Napoleon craned in to look.

Finally he recognised at least part of Waverly’s odd expression. He looked smug as he said, ‘Mr Kuryakin, you’ve been called on by the IMF.’

‘The IMF?’ Napoleon echoed, and Illya asked, ‘The – International Monetary Fund, sir?’

Waverly huffed. ‘The Impossible Missions Force, as I’m sure you know well.’

Illya’s eyebrows rose. He had heard of the Impossible Missions Force, of course, but only in passing. Napoleon had a look on his face which suggested he was a little more familiar.

‘Well, well, well,’ the American said, tapping his fingers on the table. ‘They want Illya, sir? Er – what about me?’

‘Jealous?’ Illya asked slyly.

Napoleon snorted. ‘The missions they take on? Not at all. But I  _ am _ your partner,’ he added softly. ‘And I like to – er – have your back.’

How was it that even with such a routine phrase Napoleon could sound suggestive, seductive? But he did, and Illya suppressed a shiver.

‘Oh, you’ll go along with Mr Kuryakin this first time, certainly,’ Waverly nodded. ‘It’s possible you’ll be needed and I’d prefer to send you in as a team considering, as you so astutely pointed out, the type of missions they take on. I’m afraid I know very little about the mission myself,’ he continued, sounding a little disgruntled. ‘The man in the photo is James Phelps, the head of his particular force. He has four or five regular agents under him but he does tend to call on outsiders when needed. In this case it seems that we’re needed.’ He fixed Illya with his pale gaze. ‘ _ You _ are needed, Mr Kuryakin.’

Illya looked down at the photograph again, trying to glean something from those very regular features. The man was probably from Germanic stock, and as such looked all-American. He was never certain of men who looked so conventionally attractive.

‘If you don’t know anything about the mission, sir – ’ he prompted.

‘You and Mr Solo will be told everything when you meet him,’ Waverly said, fumbling for a pipe and then clenching his hand, tight and empty. ‘Drat, I keep forgetting that I’ve pledged to my doctor to cut back,’ he said distractedly, but when he looked up again his eyes were gimlet sharp. ‘Oh, and try to appear at the briefing well dressed in monotones. Mr Phelps doesn’t like colours to distract at his briefings, and he likes his agents to be well presented.’

Illya’s eyebrows shot up. It didn’t bode well that, on that small evidence, Mr Phelps seemed to be either mad or a control freak. Or maybe both.

‘Well, most of my wardrobe is basic black,’ he commented, fiddling with the lapel of his suit. Napoleon followed suite, feeling the fabric between thumb and finger, and then looked up at Waverly.

‘Don’t worry, sir. I’ll – ah – take him to my tailor’s before we go,’ he promised.

‘Thank you, Mr Solo,’ Waverly said with some relief, as Illya asked indignantly, ‘And what’s wrong with  _ my  _ tailor, thank you very much?’

‘ _ Your  _ – er – tailor has never set eyes on you in his life, and has another million clients he’s never seen,’ Napoleon said acerbically. ‘Whereas mine – ’

‘Caters very nicely to the bourgeois, I’m sure,’ Illya interrupted acidly.

Napoleon grinned. ‘Well,  _ comrade _ ,’ he said, putting great emphasis on the word, ‘as soon as you’re out of this I’m sure you can go back to wearing the People’s Suit. But if this Mr Phelps wants you well dressed it will be my pleasure to dress you. My very  _ great  _ pleasure.’

‘All right, all right, that’s enough now, gentlemen,’ Waverly cut across. ‘Oh, er, U.N.C.L.E. will pay for the suit, by the way.’

Illya’s eyebrows shot up. Those words gave him a sense of foreboding. It was hard enough to get Mr Waverly to authorise the price of a meal while on duty, let alone the full price of a tailored suit. He exchanged looks with Napoleon, and saw that he was similarly uncertain about the meaning of all this.

Waverly rapped his knuckles on the table. ‘Yes, all right. No need to look like a fish fresh out of water, Mr Solo. We’re not as penny-pinching as all that, you know. Let’s get back to the business at hand. You’re to come to Mr Phelps’ apartment at seven-thirty tomorrow night. I hope that’s enough time for Mr Solo’s tailor to do his job. I will give you the address just before you leave. Mr Phelps likes to be circumspect with his personal information.’

‘Well then, why – er – why doesn’t he have the meeting somewhere else?’ Napoleon asked innocently. ‘Here, even?’

‘Mr Phelps  _ always _ holds his briefings in his apartment,’ Waverly said, and Illya sensed that there was no point even starting to argue that point. Mr Phelps, it seemed, was a law unto himself.

‘Sir, do you – er – do you know what this mission will entail?’ Illya asked curiously and rather cautiously.

Waverly harrumphed. ‘The bare bones, Mr Kuryakin. The bare bones. You will be told everything you need to know tomorrow evening. And do know, of course, that it is entirely up to you whether you accept.’

That worried Illya more than anything else Waverly had said so far. How often was he given the chance to turn down a mission? He could count the instances on one hand.

‘I can tell you one thing, Mr Kuryakin,’ Waverly said confidently. ‘James Phelps is as loyal to and protective of his agents as any top U.N.C.L.E. man. He makes every possible effort to pull his men out alive, and he rarely fails. He has risked everything to retrieve a captured agent in the past and not compromised the mission. If I had to put your life in the hands of anyone outside of U.N.C.L.E. I would put it in his hands.’

‘That’s reassuring, sir,’ Solo nodded.

‘But it’s  _ my _ life,’ Illya added tartly.

  


((O))

  


E n route to Napoleon’s tailor in Napoleon’s boat-like and very American car, Illya was brooding. Napoleon would have said he was brooding in a typically Russian way, but he would have defied Napoleon not to brood himself if he had been specifically called upon by the IMF for a mission that Mr Waverly didn’t see fit to disclose.

‘Why do you think they want  _ me _ , Napoleon?’ he asked after a while.

Napoleon favoured him with the kind of smile that made his stomach turn to butterflies. ‘Who wouldn’t want you,  _ tovarisch _ ? Cute, blond, very,  _ very _ intelligent, and all of five eight – in shoes. What is there not to want?’

‘Napoleon,’ Illya batted that away. ‘I’m serious. There are hundreds of agents at this man’s disposal, and not just in U.N.C.L.E.. Why me?’

‘You’re doing yourself a disservice,’ Napoleon said tolerantly. ‘You’re one of the best agents U.N.C.L.E. has ever had. Your skills are top level. You’ve been proven on a hundred missions.’

‘But so are you,’ Illya shrugged. ‘What have I got that you haven’t got?’

Napoleon glanced over him, fondness melting his chocolate eyes. ‘You underestimate yourself,’ he said with a gentle smile.

‘I am Russian,’ Illya said.

‘Well, there you are,’ Napoleon nodded, his smile turning into a grin. ‘I told you you were top level. You even know where you’re from.’

‘ _ Napoleon _ ,’ Illya growled. ‘The IMF take a lot of missions on the eastern side of the curtain, don’t they? In fact, they specialise in that. East Germany, Poland, Russia...’

At that Napoleon’s expression became serious again. ‘Yes, they do,’ he said soberly. ‘And yes, you are Russian.’

‘I love my mother country, Napoleon,’ Illya said with open honesty. ‘But Russia is a harsh mother, subject to whims and hard to please.’

Napoleon turned the car into a convenient parking spot outside his tailor’s, pulled on the parking brake, and rested his hand lightly on his partner’s knee.

‘I’ll be there,  _ tovarisch _ ,’ he said softly. ‘I’ll always be there.’

Illya met his gaze, but still, he was troubled. Intentions were beautiful things, but Napoleon was one man, and Russia was very large, and very strong.

  


((O))

  


Napoleon fussed one more time with Illya’s tie before releasing him with a smile. His tailor had done a very good job, and in very short time. Illya did wear his cheap black suits well, it was true, but this suit was grey with just enough of a hint of purple in the silky weave to make Illya’s eyes look like brooding storm clouds, and set off the gold in his hair to startling effect. It made Napoleon think of a lightning storm above a wheat field. Illya was unaccustomed to wearing a waistcoat, but the waistcoat made him look amazing. Illya’s small stature just condensed the effect and made it all the more striking.

‘You’ll do,’ he said carelessly, but the look in his eyes said much more. If there’d been time he would have happily peeled Illya like an exquisite fruit, shown him exactly how attractive the suit had made him, and then enjoyed dressing him all over again.

‘There isn’t _time_ , Napoleon,’ Illya growled, accurately reading that look. ‘We’ve got to get to HQ for the address before we even know how much time to allow to get to Phelps.’

Napoleon kissed his forehead lightly. He knew Illya was concerned about what this mission might mean and he was going to be taciturn and grumpy until the mission was revealed. Depending on the mission, he might continue just as taciturn afterwards. As the Russian had told Waverly, when it came down to the wire it was  _his_ life.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s get to the car.’

Illya reached out and smoothed his partner’s lapel with a small smile, a wordless apology for his mood.

‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘We need to go.’

  


((O))

  


As it turned out, Phelps’ apartment wasn’t too far away at all. It was set in Manhattan looking over the East River much like Illya’s and Napoleon’s, but the IMF, by the looks of things, remunerated their agents rather more handsomely than U.N.C.L.E.. Not surprising, really, since their money came directly from the Secretary.

When they arrived Phelps’ other agents were already there, and Illya cast his eye over them appraisingly from the doorway. Phelps himself, suave in a grey suit and striped tie. A large, dark haired man in black who, although pleasant looking, had the distinct look of being more muscle than brain. A black man with a rather self effacing look, dressed in dark grey. A tall, gangling man with an over-mobile face. And a woman. Illya stiffened at that. She was, he had to admit, exquisite, but exquisite as was a china doll. She was dressed immaculately in black, her hair coiffed immaculately, her make-up immaculate on her pale face. She smiled charmingly at their entrance, but remained sitting while the men rose as one. Illya drew in breath. Not one of them could have been below six foot two, and the muscle man must have been at least six four.

Beside him, Napoleon smiled in a way that only Illya could have read as nervous, and extended a hand to Phelps.

‘I do hope we’re not late.’

Illya repressed a snort. Napoleon knew full well they weren’t late. He had been checking his watch a moment before the door opened.

‘Not at all. It’s good to see you, gentlemen,’ Phelps said. His voice held a Midwest twang which suited his looks. ‘Jim Phelps,’ he said warmly, offering his hand first to Napoleon, then to Illya. ‘Call me Jim.’ He turned into the room with a welcoming smile, indicating the man with the mobile face. ‘Rollin Hand,’ he said. He introduced the black man as Barney Collier, the muscle man as Willy Armitage, then gestured with a rather softer smile at the lady, ‘And Cinnamon Carter.’

‘Enchanted,’ Napoleon said immediately, slipping into his tomcat role as he stepped across the room to kiss the lady’s hand. ‘Haven’t I seen you in – er – ’

‘I’ve modelled for various publications, Mr – ’ And she turned her wide eyes on Mr Phelps questioningly.

‘Ah, yes, this is Mr Napoleon Solo, and Dr Illya Kuryakin,’ Phelps said immediately, indicating them each in turn. ‘Two of U.N.C.L.E.’s finest agents. I hope Dr Kuryakin will be able to help us.’

‘I – er – don’t use the title,’ Illya said rather diffidently, but he appeared to have caught the interest of Mr Collier, who came forward and extended a hand.

‘What’s the doctorate in?’

Illya was immediately struck with the feeling that he liked this man. There was a deep, capable intelligence in his eyes and his handshake was warm and sincere. He could feel the calluses on the man’s hand that spoke of physical work.

‘Quantum mechanics,’ he replied, returning the pressure on Collier’s hand.

‘MIT?’

Illya smiled gently. ‘Cambridge – England, not Massachusetts. ’

Mr Collier looked impressed. ‘I studied engineering at MIT,’ he explained. ‘I thought perhaps –  ’

Phelps clapped Collier on the back in a way that spoke of great familiarity, and Collier smiled at him. The apparent closeness between Mr Phelps and his team was reassuring.

‘According to his dossier, Kuryakin shares plenty with you, Barney, at least in terms of skills. Particularly in the field of explosives,’ he said with a smile just barely on the good side of wicked.

At that, Illya grinned too. ‘I do find a certain – job satisfaction – in a really good explosion,’ he admitted.

‘Oh, yes, if I want anything reduced to rubble Illya’s my first port of call,’ Napoleon put in smoothly, but Illya recognised the slightest hint of jealousy beneath his words. Napoleon did so like to be the centre of attention and it must be disconcerting for everything to be centred on Illya.

‘Gentlemen, take a seat,’ Phelps said, indicating a low, stylish sofa. ‘And let’s get down to business.’

At that, Illya relaxed a little more. It was a relief to be excused from all the social stuff and get down to the reason they were here. He took a seat and was glad when Napoleon slipped down beside him. He was nervous, and he hated that. On the available evidence he had good reason to be nervous, but he still hated it. His comfort zone was broad but infinitely complex, and this situation did not fit in it.

Phelps took a seat himself, lit a cigarette with great efficiency, then offered the packet to his guests. Both shook their heads in polite refusal.

‘All right, let’s get down to brass tacks,’ he said, leaning forward in his seat and resting his elbows on his knees. He fixed Illya with a penetrating blue gaze, and began, ‘Dr Kuryakin.’

‘Mr Kuryakin,’ Illya reminded him quietly.

He nodded in acknowledgement. ‘Mr Kuryakin, we need a man to infiltrate the gulag.’

So  _that_ was it. Illya felt a twisting sickness in the pit of his stomach. He had always been something other than an average citizen, never quite willing to toe the line, and so the thought of the camps had haunted him all his life. But he corrected almost automatically, ‘The  _glavnoye upravleniye lagerey_ was disbanded in early 1960, Mr Phelps. It no longer exists.’

‘My apologies – of course you’re right,’ he nodded, looking pleased rather than annoyed at Illya’s correction. ‘But forced labour camps still exist. A man by the name of Vasily Permyakov has been in one of those camps for over a year. Conventional methods of extraction have failed. We need a man to get in there, to contact Permyakov and get him out. A man who won’t be caught out by the authorities, who are already on guard because of previous attempts. None of us could pass flawlessly as Russian, while you – ’

Illya suddenly became aware of Napoleon beside him. His partner looked incredulous. ‘You actually want to send Illya into one of those – those hell holes?’

Illya levelled a slightly wan gaze on him. ‘He is right, Napoleon. They couldn’t pass as Russian. But I  _am_ Russian.’

‘And a man loosely fitting your description is currently awaiting dispatch to one of those camps, Mr Kuryakin,’ Phelps continued.

‘Convicted of?’

Phelps’ smile was grim, and he sounded reticent when he said, ‘He was a practising homosexual, Mr Kuryakin.’

That fact sank through him like ice. Why could he not have been a foolish poet, a political dissident, a simple thief; anything less likely to bring down fires of disgusted retribution on his head? He was not pleased that his voice, when he managed to speak, was little more than a squeak.

‘He was a – _practising homosexual?_ ’ His eyes shot to Napoleon’s, met his worried gaze, but he saw he didn’t understand the full import of that fact. ‘Have you considered just killing me now? It would be quicker and altogether cheaper.’

‘Hey!’ Napoleon said, sitting forward suddenly in his seat. ‘Illya, what do you mean by that?’

Illya smiled grimly. ‘Napoleon, the camps are vicious places for men,’ he said. ‘They are many degrees more hellish for women. But for  _opushchennye_ ...’

He trailed off, unable to complete his thought in a steady voice. He had never thought of himself as homosexual. His relationship with Napoleon was quite unique in his experience. But of course back home, if anyone suggested that there was anything more than platonic friendship between him and his lover, he would be there too, in the  _zona_ , labelled as  _opushchennye._ The thought made him dizzy.

‘It _will_ be a difficult task,’ Phelps confirmed, for all the world as if he were talking about an awkward bit of electrical work.

‘Jim?’ Armitage interrupted tentatively. The burly strongman had a voice much softer than his appearance would suggest. ‘Do you think he can take it? I mean, he’s – ’

Illya straightened his spine as Napoleon said rather defensively, ‘Illya is much stronger than he looks, I promise you.’

Illya was grateful for that defence, but still, he was uneasy. Even as an average prisoner, as one not tainted by the word  _ opushchennye _ , h e wasn’t sure how he would manage on camp rations and twelve or more hours of forced labour a day.

‘How long would I be in the _zona_? I mean, the camp?’ he corrected himself hastily.

‘Obviously for as little time as possible – but as long as it takes,’ Phelps said rather uncomfortably. ‘The sooner Permyakov is secured the sooner we can get you out. But it’s imperative we get him out intact. And he may take some time to identify and contact and persuade.’

‘You think he’d want to stay in that place?’ Napoleon asked incredulously.

‘He will not be quick to trust – _anyone_ ,’ Illya told him. ‘In the camps you can trust no one.’

‘We’ll have men on the outside,’ Phelps assured him quickly. ‘Barney and Willy and possibly myself, if I can’t secure a position at the work area, will camp as close as possible to the gulag – er, to the camp, or more probably to the work area – to be ready to extract you.’

‘And me,’ Napoleon put in quickly. Illya felt a surge of warmth.

‘Ah, now, Mr Solo – ’

‘If you think I’m leaving my partner without trusted backup – ’ Napoleon flared.

Phelps held up his hands. ‘We’re all professionals, and we have a lot of details to work out, Mr Solo.’

‘Well, what I don’t understand is why Illya and I can’t just go in together and break him out,’ Napoleon said rather defensively. ‘We’re used to undertaking this kind of mission.’

‘Well, for a start because the mission was given to my IMF team by the Secretary,’ Mr Phelps said tolerantly. ‘Unlike the U.N.C.L.E., we _do_ work politically, and very often. And I think you’ll be glad that we’re there. Barney is unparalleled in the field of technology. I am an expert strategist. And you’ll need Rollin’s make-up skills to be able to make the switch with the prisoner en route to the camp.’

‘But how will I keep up the make-up in a camp environment?’ Illya asked doubtfully.

Mr Hand shook his head. ‘You won’t need to, Dr Kuryakin. I’ll show you how to strip it gradually through the journey. The guards change often enough, and people see what they expect to see. Do it slowly enough and no one will notice the change. By the time you’re in the camp Barney will have altered the original prisoner’s documents to show your picture and fingerprints, and no one will be the wiser.’

Illya considered that. He had looked into this team since Waverly’s announcement and he knew that their skills were of the highest level. It was true that he and Napoleon knew little of using make-up for disguises.

‘How long do I get to decide if I’ll do this?’ he asked.

‘Lagoshin is due to be shipped out in five days’ time,’ Phelps said quietly. ‘We’ll need to be in situ in three days, at the latest. I’d prefer sooner. If you won’t do it, we’ll need time to find someone else. So – ’

‘So I must answer now,’ Illya nodded. Somehow he had felt that would be the case.

‘Yes,’ Phelps said simply.

‘This man, Permyakov. Why do you want him?’

‘He is a world class physicist, Mr Kuryakin, and unknown to the Soviet authorities he had been planning to defect, to join the US in their nuclear development programme. Now, they never discovered that plan. He was convicted only of political dissidence. We _need_ him in this country. He’s particularly focussed on making nuclear power safe and clean. There are advances we could make that would benefit millions of lives, and no doubt save millions too, on both sides of the Iron Curtain.’

Illya felt his loyalties warring within him. He was still a Russian citizen, still supposedly loyal to his country.

‘You understand what it will mean for me if I’m caught?’ he asked. ‘Even if my involvement is discovered after the fact?’

Phelps nodded. ‘Yes, Mr Kuryakin. You will be hunted down and killed, or you will find yourself back in the camps. But there will never be a scrap of documentary evidence linking you to this mission. After you have been extracted the records will be changed back to erase your fingerprints and photograph. There will be nothing with your name either on the books of the IMF, or U.N.C.L.E..’

Illya dropped his head. He wanted time to think. He wanted silence and solitude, not five strangers all waiting for his answer. This question was too big to answer lightly. Napoleon must have read that need, because he said, ‘Ah, Mr Phelps, is there somewhere Illya and I could go for a private talk?’

Phelps glanced at the balcony doors, then seemed to change his mind and said, ‘The kitchen’s just over there, gentlemen. Take as much time as you need.’

Illya sighed quietly and got to his feet, not looking back to see if Napoleon was following. He knew he would be. Sure enough, Napoleon caught the door as he went through it, and as soon as it was closed he stepped very close to his partner and put his hand on his arm.

‘Illya? You can say no. You do know that.’

‘I know that,’ he said. ‘But – ’

He didn’t know how to verbalise it. He looked up, hoping that Napoleon could read his eyes,

‘I know,’ Napoleon said softly. ‘I know. That’s why we’re in this business. Because there are things more important than our own lives...’

Illya stalked away and leant his palms on a granite counter top, letting the cool of the stone seep up his arms. The  _zona_ would be a hundred times colder. It would be hard, unbearably hard. It could break him. If he told Napoleon honestly everything that he feared might happen there Napoleon would forbid him to go, despite the fact that he had no real right to do so.

He huffed out his breath hard.

‘I’ll do it,’ he said shortly.

Napoleon crossed the small space with astonishing swiftness, taking hold of his arms from behind.

‘Illya, are you sure?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘No, not at all. But I’ll do it.’ He jerked his head towards the door. ‘Come on.’

‘Illya.’ Napoleon turned the Russian around, leant forward to touch their heads together. Illya let the warmth of Napoleon’s broad forehead flow into his, wondering if he looked as pale as he felt. ‘I will be there,’ Napoleon promised. ‘That’s your condition. I will be on the team.’

Illya reluctantly drew away, and nodded sharply. It was better to do this quickly, before he changed his mind. He strode back to the kitchen door and pushed it open to see Mr Phelps quietly talking with his team. They all looked around when the door opened.

‘I will do it,’ he said. ‘I will do it, as long as Mr Solo is involved in every process and is there on the outside to get me out.’

Then he walked stiffly back to his place on the sofa, and sat down, clasping his hands in his lap, wishing he could sit on them to stop them shaking.

Mr Phelps’ face broke out in a smile that would be suited to any American farm boy.

‘I’m glad,’ was all he said. He looked over towards his drinks cabinet, then said, ‘Can I offer you a drink? Vodka, Mr Kuryakin?’

Illya smiled very slightly. He needed to drink.

‘Scotch,’ he said. ‘Thank you.’

‘The same,’ Napoleon nodded. He had joined him on the sofa.

‘Well then,’ Phelps said, taking off his jacket and striding over to the drinks cabinet. Illya noticed he didn’t ask anyone else what they wanted, just mixed them drinks as if he were well used to their preferences. ‘We might as well get talking,’ he said, bringing back drinks for both U.N.C.L.E. agents. ‘The sooner we outline the plan the sooner we can work out any bumps.’

Illya nodded, and took a deep swallow of the fiery scotch. It helped. He watched as Phelps started to lay out plans on the coffee table, idly noting that he was left-handed. It always did to notice these details. He was glad of having something to focus on. If Phelps had dismissed them now with the instruction to come back tomorrow he didn’t think he could have taken it.

‘Lagoshin is being held here,’ Phelps said, laying his finger down on a building on a hand-drawn plan of a Russian town. It was nowhere Illya had heard of, but he was sure he would be educated further on those details. ‘You’ll be glad of one thing, Mr Kuryakin – he shares your first name, although his is spelled with only one ‘l’. Now, we plan to make the switch just before he leaves his cell, and I’ll tell you just how. It’s a plan we’ve used before with great success, and luckily you’re quite small...’

The details hummed in the air around them. Everyone was involved, everyone had an opinion, everyone was listened to. Illya was glad that his and Napoleon’s opinions were given just as much credence as Mr Phelps’ usual team members. They spoke for hours, long into the night, sipping scotch while Phelps and Collier in particular filled the room with tobacco smoke. The central thrust of the plan was to substitute Illya for Lagoshin just before he was shipped out for the camp. In the long train journey there Illya would be able to gradually strip away the small vestiges of his disguise, and by the time he arrived at the camp his appearance would be his own. Once in the camp he would have to look out for Permyakov and gradually gain his confidence, to the point where they would be able to arrange his extraction. The most likely labour for the inmates was logging, and although the work would be hard, the rural setting would be a slightly easier area to extract from.

‘But what we’re not sure on is how you’ll be able to let us know he’s ready for extraction,’ Phelps said in a preoccupied tone. ‘Or how we’ll be able to let you know the procedure, because that’s going to change depending on the exact terrain.’

‘A communicator,’ Illya said simply.

‘Yes, but our radios are too large to conceal. You’ll be subject to a full body search when you arrive and pat down searches every day.’

Illya slipped his hand into his inside pocket and brought out his U.N.C.L.E. communicator. ‘This is a communicator. It has the appearance and functionality of a working pen,’ he said.

‘You won’t be allowed to bring a working pen in with you.’

‘I  _ know _ that,’ Illya said, then mentally chided himself for letting his nerves break through as impatience. ‘Mr Phelps – ’

‘Jim, please.’

He nodded rather stiffly. ‘All right. Jim, do you know if they do cavity searches?’

‘I – ’ He looked around at the other team members. ‘I believe just the standard squat and lift. Nothing requiring a doctor’s presence.’

Illya nodded. ‘If I can wrap this in something I can conceal it in my rectum,’ he said. ‘You say you’ll make the switch when I’m taken to the train. That will be after any last searches I hope. The cargo wagon will be dark and disorderly. I can take something just beforehand to prevent bowel movements, which will be quite welcome on the train, insert the pen when I’m near the destination, and extract it after I arrive at the camp. I’ll find somewhere to hide it there.’

‘Illya, that’s risky,’ Napoleon said seriously. ‘If it goes wrong you’ll need surgery, and I wouldn’t want to leave you in their hands for that – whether or not they decided to operate.’

Illya met his eyes, reading his very real concern. ‘I’ve done it before, Napoleon. We both have. I can put fishing line on it – no doubt we can come up with something even finer – and stick the end to my skin with an invisible patch.’

‘Yeah, we can get the wire and the patch all right,’ Rollin Hand confirmed. ‘Something they’ll never pick up unless they run their hands over it.’

‘Illya, if it’s discovered the whole game will be up,’ Napoleon said, still looking worried.

‘If it’s discovered they’ll think it’s just a pen. We can even engrave it with Lagoshin’s name, make it look like a lover’s gift. I’ll tell them how important it is to me to be able to write. I will make eyes at them and speak like a love-sick poet. They’ll believe it of me. They would believe it of  _ him. _ Of his type.’

He hated himself as he said that. Lagoshin’s type and his own were no different. He would go home tonight and he would work out his anxiety and his fear carnally with Napoleon, and no, he and Lagoshin were no different at all.

Jim Phelps just regarded him for a few moments, and it was impossible to tell what was passing in his mind. Then he nodded.

‘All right. I think it’s worth the risk.’ He flicked his wrist over and looked at his watch. ‘Well, it’s almost two in the morning, and we’ll need to meet again to go over more details tomorrow. Say – eleven hundred? I’ll let you both go get some sleep.’

Illya set his glass down and smoothed his hands over his thighs. He was tired, but he wasn’t sure he would be able to sleep.

‘Tomorrow, then,’ he said, pushing himself up and waiting for Napoleon to join him.

‘Oh – one thing,’ Rollin Hand said, unfolding himself from his chair and striding loosely across the room. He stood for a moment regarding Illya. He was the make-up specialist, and Illya could see his thoughts moving in that direction. ‘Mr Kuryakin, our sources tell us that Lagoshin’s head was shaved this morning by the prison staff. Lice control, you know. I’m afraid you’ll have to do the same.’

Illya’s eyes widened momentarily, before he could stop the reaction. Then he nodded.

‘It will be done,’ he said shortly. He glanced at Napoleon and saw his stricken expression. ‘Come on, Napoleon,’ he said, his voice shorter still. ‘We need to get  _ some  _ sleep, after all.’

  


((O))

  


In the room after the two U.N.C.L.E. agents were gone, Jim plumped down into a chair again and picked up his drink. He looked around at his team.

‘Well. What do you think?’

Rollin spoke first. ‘He’s a good fit, Jim. He’s got the bone structure, the stature, he’s about the right body weight. I’m sorry about his hair...’

‘We all make sacrifices,’ Jim murmured. ‘Barney?’

‘Yes, Jim, I think he’ll do,’ the man nodded, stubbing out a cigarette in the closest ashtray and fetching another from his pocket. ‘He’s intelligent –  _ very  _ intelligent – and by all accounts very good at his job. Anyone could see how dedicated he was once he’d made his decision.’

‘He’s stronger than he looks, too,’ Willy put in. ‘Jim, when he first walked in here I wondered why you’d picked that – doll – to help us. But I was watching him while he was here. He’s no doll. He’s strong, he’s agile.’

‘He’s attractive,’ Cinnamon put in in a voice so soft it almost went unheard.

Rollin glanced at her quickly, then stretched out his long legs and crossed them at the ankles. ‘ _ How _ attractive?’ he asked with a broad smile.

She returned the smile. ‘Enough,’ she said. ‘But really, it’s a moot point, isn’t it? That’s not going to get him anywhere in the gulag. But what about Mr Solo?’

Rollin laughed. ‘I’m sure he’s attractive enough too.’

‘No, I mean, is he as good as his partner?’

Jim looked around the gathered team members, and nodded. ‘He’s the best. Don’t doubt that. I’ll be glad to have him on the team.’

‘He’s not used to bowing to someone else’s commands,’ Rollin suggested. ‘They work in small teams in the U.N.C.L.E. and he’s used to only answering to Waverly.’

‘Well.’ Jim grinned. ‘He’ll get used to it. He wants us to get Mr Kuryakin out alive. He’ll listen to us, and we need to listen to him. According to Waverly there’s not a man alive that knows Kuryakin better than Mr Solo. Not a man alive who cares for him so deeply, either.’

‘ _ That _ deeply, Jim?’ Cinnamon asked, sounding worried now.

Jim glanced over towards the door through which the U.N.C.L.E. agents had so recently left, remembering how Solo had ushered Kuryakin out with a hand in the small of his back, and how Kuryakin had seemed completely at ease with that intimate touch.

‘I don’t know, Cinnamon. I can’t tell. They’re very close, but – ’

‘Will it be a problem, Jim? I mean, if they’re queer?’ Rollin asked directly. ‘If they’re together?’

He shook his head. ‘I don’t think so.’ He looked meaningfully between Rollin and Cinnamon. ‘After all, they wouldn’t be the first team members to be romantically involved, would they? But either way, we’re going to have to shepherd Mr Solo very carefully. He’s good, but he’s a wild card. I think he’d do anything to get Kuryakin out of there alive, and we need to make sure he doesn’t get any of us killed in trying.’

  


((O))

  


Illya sat on a chair in the bathroom just staring into the mirror. It had been almost half past two in the morning when they’d got in, and they’d gone straight up to Napoleon’s apartment without a word, silently agreeing that neither wanted to sleep alone tonight. But he couldn’t go to bed yet.

He lifted a hand and ran it through his hair, watching his mirror fingers move through the straw coloured strands. His eyes looked worried and pale. He swallowed.

‘Are you sure you want to do this tonight?’ Napoleon asked. ‘We could do it tomorrow morning.’

Illya pressed his lips together hard, and shook his head. ‘No. Now, Napoleon. It needs to be now.’

Napoleon bent and laid a kiss on that golden crown of hair. Illya closed his eyes. He couldn’t bear to see his lover’s expression.

‘Now, Napoleon,’ he said again. He was still softened a little by the scotch, still a little numbed by all that had happened that evening. ‘Just do it.’

He kept his eyes closed, but he felt Napoleon run a hand through his hair, oh so tenderly. And then he lifted a clump of hair, and there was a crisp snick. Another, and another, Napoleon’s hands moving with infinite tenderness, and he knew that his hair was raining about him onto the bathroom floor. After a while Napoleon laid the scissors down with a metallic clink on the basin, and he opened his eyes. He wished he hadn’t. In the mirror he looked smaller, paler. His remaining hair was a scarecrow mess of light straw, short little bits all of different lengths. Napoleon was gathering up the long locks from the floor and putting them into a large envelope.

‘Oh, Napoleon,’ he said, his voice an odd mixture of exasperation and sorrow. ‘Just put it in the bin.’

‘No,’ Napoleon said softly. He sealed the envelope and leant it up against the wall. ‘No, I won’t.’

Illya closed his eyes again. He wished he hadn’t looked.

‘Well, hurry up then,’ he said, the unforgivable tone of anger roughening his voice again. He didn’t mean to be angry with Napoleon. He wasn’t angry with him. He was angry at himself for agreeing to do this, angry with himself for being so afraid.

‘All right, IK,’ Napoleon said.

His hand stroked gently over Illya’s forehead, a soft, tender gesture that brought a lump to Illya’s throat. And then the tap began to run and the scent of steam filled the air, and a moment later Napoleon was lathering what was left of Illya’s hair, and the razor began to run across his scalp. Illya kept his eyes closed the whole time, and he didn’t look in the mirror when he left the room.

In bed later he clasped himself around Napoleon, pressing his head into his lover’s chest. Their love making had been rough at first, and then slow and tender the second time around, and now he was exhausted, hovering on the edge of sleep. The scent and warmth of Napoleon was all around him. He could still smell the faint scent of come, and the stronger scents of their bodies’ sweats mingling together, and Napoleon’s day-old aftershave mixing with his own. Napoleon’s arms were around him, holding him tight, his hand stroking slowly at his back. Napoleon’s lips touched his head, and neither could hide his momentary flinch from the other as they were both reminded of Illya’s baldness. But then they softened again, Illya’s breath started coming soft and slow again against Napoleon’s chest, and ever so slowly Napoleon stroked him into sleep.

  


((O))

  


At breakfast they tried to ignore it. Napoleon made coffee and Illya made toast under the grill and stirred scrambled eggs on the stove. Every time he moved he felt the oddness, the cool of his scalp, the strange hyper-sensation of skin that was usually insulated from touch. But perhaps it was harder for Napoleon. After all, Illya couldn’t see it unless he looked in a mirror.

‘Well then, what do you think of Mr Phelps and his team?’ Napoleon asked, his voice a study in insouciance, not turning from the percolator.

‘They’re all – very tall,’ Illya said rather regretfully as he pulled out the grill tray to flip the toast.

Napoleon laughed. ‘Yes, they’re tall, my petite Russian comrade. What about Miss – er – Carter?’

Illya grunted. ‘She’s tall too, or tall enough.’

‘I meant as a woman,’ Napoleon chided him softly.

He smiled coldly at that, and let his voice go deep and dark. ‘She reminds me of a kitten on a greeting card. One would have trouble refusing those eyes, but she would eat up one’s dish of cream and then have no compunction in clawing one to the heart, and lapping up the blood.’

‘What interesting kittens you have in your neck of the woods.’

‘Take care with her, Napoleon,’ Illya said very seriously, glancing sideways. Napoleon was still looking studiously at the percolator, despite the fact that there was nothing he needed to do to it until the coffee was ready to pour.

‘Not – my – type,’ Napoleon said very clearly. ‘No, Miss Carter’s not my type at all. Besides, I think Mr Hand might have something to say about that.’

‘Really?’ Illya quirked an eyebrow.

Napoleon chuckled. ‘Illya, you are a first class agent, but you’re very unobservant in some things. Miss Carter and Mr Hand are sleeping together.’

‘Hmm,’ Illya said contemplatively, then he looked up with a flashing smile. ‘Well, Napoleon, at least you’ve finally met someone with a name as ridiculous as your own.’

Napoleon snorted. ‘Maybe our mothers could get together and talk about it.’ He looked round at Illya’s laugh, and caught his breath, and the mood died instantly. ‘Oh, Illya,’ he said.

Illya smoothed his hand over his scalp and shrugged. ‘I will get used to it,’ he said. ‘Besides, it will be the least of my hardships.’

Napoleon’s eyes filled with concern. ‘Illya, are you really sure – ’

‘I am sure,’ he cut across quickly. ‘I have agreed, Napoleon. There’s no going back. You know that.’

Napoleon finally abandoned the percolator and crossed the kitchen to slip his arms around Illya’s waist from behind. He kissed him lightly behind his ear, and Illya shivered, but he carried on stirring the eggs.

‘Napoleon, the toast will burn,’ he warned him.

Napoleon sighed and went to pour the coffee.

  


((O))

  


They had a brief half hour after breakfast before they needed to leave for Mr Phelps’ apartment. They had both gone through breakfast trying to ignore the elephant in the room that was Illya’s shaven head and all that it implied. Illya forced himself to heartily eat two helpings of eggs despite looking like he could barely managed to swallow one, and Napoleon picked in a desultory way at his own helping and finally scraped it into the trash.

Afterwards, Napoleon took Illya through to the lounge and pulled him down onto the sofa. He didn’t think he would ever be able to get used to looking at him with his head shorn like that. He looked so small and vulnerable, and he wondered how he would survive for a moment in the Russian gulag. He wasn’t big enough, he wasn’t strong enough, he wasn’t –

He kicked himself. Illya was the strongest person he knew. He wasn’t physically large, but he was incredibly powerful. But then – he looked like someone who would be easy to dominate. Illya wouldn’t be able to risk fighting back in the camp for fear of punishment. If he were thrown into solitary he would have no chance of contacting Permyakov. So he would have to be docile, obedient, easy. And people would take advantage of that. He knew they would. Illya was too small, too beautiful...

He had to stop this self-indulgence. He would not be the one on the inside. He had to be strong for Illya’s sake. He pulled on a smile and asked, ‘How are you doing,  _tovarisch_ ?’

Illya gave him a wan smile. ‘You’ll have to get used to saying  _grazhdanin_ , Napoleon. Citizen. You’re not allowed to call people comrade in the camps.’

He looked so pale and downcast that Napoleon enveloped him in his arms.

‘Oh, I will miss this,’ Illya whispered, burrowing his face into his partner’s neck. ‘It’s ironic, really, that without realising they’re punishing me for exactly this crime.’

‘Illya!’ Napoleon sat away from him, holding his shoulders, cold with shock. ‘Illya, that’s a complete coincidence. _No one_ is punishing you for this. No one _could_ punish you for something so pure.’

Illya regarded him sadly. Without hair to balance them out, his eyes looked so much bigger and bluer. ‘Oh, Napoleon, in some ways you are so insulated from the realities of this world. There are hundreds of men in the camps who are there for exactly this. Loving. Being loved.’

Napoleon shook him. ‘But  _you_ won’t be. You’ll be there to save a man’s life. To save thousands of lives. Volunteering for this is one of the single most noble things you have ever done. But please tell me it won’t affect what we have.’

Illya’s smile was so sad that it broke his heart. ‘I can’t promise anything, Napoleon. It  _will_ affect it. I don’t know how. But a man does not enter the camps and come out the same. Especially not  _opushchennye._ ’

‘ _Don’t_ call yourself that,’ Napoleon said, more harshly than he meant. His voice softened. ‘Illya, don’t. Don’t let this taint what we have. Come on. You’re an expert in separating business and pleasure. You have to keep doing that.’

Illya leant forward, kissed him lightly on the lips, then rested his forehead against Napoleon’s and sighed.

‘I will do my best,’ he promised, ‘as long as you promise that, when I get out, you’ll help me untangle the strands.’

Napoleon lifted his hand, hesitated, then stroked his palm deliberately down over Illya’s scalp, where the first velvet of stubble was beginning to show. Illya shivered at the touch, and Napoleon laid kisses in the wake of his hand.

‘I will untangle you,’ he promised. ‘Always.’

  


((O))

  


They were back in Phelps’ apartment by eleven, Napoleon still slickly dressed, but Illya opting for his quasi-uniform of black trousers and a black poloneck, his head covered with a fitting black woollen cap of the type he often used to disguise his bright hair during night missions. It was easier to look at him like that, Napoleon admitted, and he was glad Illya had something to protect his shorn head from the autumn chill in the air. But he kept it on even in Mr Phelps’ apartment, which was well warmed by an open fire, and Napoleon knew that he felt self-conscious not just because of losing his hair but because of the reason it had had to go.

‘It’s best you keep a low profile from now until we leave tomorrow evening,’ Phelps told Illya as he took a chair near the coffee table. ‘We don’t want any questions about the hair cut. Nothing that would lead people back to you. I’ve spoken to your Mr Waverly and he’s agreed that you shouldn’t visit U.N.C.L.E. headquarters until after you get back.’ He levelled his gaze at Illya then. ‘And you  _ will _ get back, Illya,’ he promised. ‘Now, that’s not sentiment. We can’t risk you being left in their hands and it being found out that the U.N.C.L.E. has loaned us an agent for a political mission. We  _ have _ to extract you.’

‘Dead or alive,’ Illya said in a dark voice.

Phelps gave a half smile. ‘Yes, dead or alive, but we’ll try for alive.’ He looked at his watch. ‘We’ll start talking over the plans now, but I have lunch being delivered at one. Will that suit everyone?’

There was a murmur of agreement from the room at large, and Napoleon noticed the eager look in Illya’s eyes. Illya was the most food centred man he knew, and he would be able to eat more happily now they were back at Phelps’ place planning the mission rather than waiting back at his own place.

‘I – ah – assume everyone present will have a role in the mission?’ Napoleon asked, his eyes turning towards Cinnamon.

‘Oh yes, everyone has a role,’ the woman replied in her polite, soft voice. ‘I’ll be at the initial transfer at the jail, Napoleon, and if possible I will be part of Jim’s cover when Illya is in the camp.’

Napoleon glanced at Phelps. ‘And your cover is?’

Phelps grimaced. ‘I’m going to try to get a place at the work site so that I can keep an eye on Illya. My Russian isn’t so good but my German is fluent, and I can go in as a German of a Russian father. Cinnamon will be my wife, and anything else she needs to be.’

‘And Mr Hand?’ Napoleon asked.

Jim laughed. ‘Well, his Russian is less rusty. We’re still working on where we can get him in. I want as tight a network as possible around Illya.’

_ To catch him when he falls _ , Napoleon thought rather fatalistically, then shook himself. That was more Illya’s line. He needed to be optimistic for his partner.

‘And I’ll camp out in the woods with Barney and Willy, huh?’

‘With your admittedly poor Russian and your physical looks I think that’s best. None of you will be able to pass as Russian. You’ll be the first on hand to receive Illya when he comes out.’

‘Hmm.’ He liked that thought, but couldn’t help but feel like something of a third wheel. Phelps was right, of course. He didn’t look particularly Russian, and he was more used to playing the suave gambler, the monied American rake, than the more down to earth characters that Illya so enjoyed. He wouldn’t know where to begin as a gulag guard – and besides, he knew he was too closely involved. If Illya started to suffer too badly he wouldn’t be able to just let him be. It was enough that they were letting him come on the mission. It would have to be enough.

‘Must it be  _ now _ ?’ he heard Illya say, and he looked round sharply. Rollin Hand was speaking to him in a low voice, and Illya looked dubious.

‘What is it?’ Napoleon asked, instantly concerned.

Illya looked at him with a dark expression in his blue eyes, but Rollin said with a smile, ‘I was just suggesting to Illya that we should go make his cast. I need a cast of his face for the appliances,’ he explained.

Napoleon wondered idly how anyone with a face like that, with a mouth so wide and mobile, could look so unutterably charming all the same. But somehow Rollin did. But he understood Illya’s reticence. For the cast he would have to remove the cap.

‘Can you do it somewhere more private?’ he asked in a low voice, knowing that Illya really wouldn’t want him to make a scene out of his personal issues.

‘We can do it in the bathroom, if you prefer, Illya,’ Rollin shrugged easily.

Illya glanced between the two and touched his hand to the knit cap. ‘Yes, I’d prefer that.’

It would be too much like babysitting to follow the pair to the bathroom, but Napoleon wished he could do just that. He wanted to spend every moment he could with Illya. He seemed so vulnerable. But he stayed where he was as Illya and Rollin left the room, and forced his mind back to the plans that were spread out on the table. He buried himself in them, deliberately losing awareness of everything else. He wanted to be fully up to spec with what was going to go on in the Russian town where Lagoshin was being held, and where the transfer would be made.

  


((O))

  


Meanwhile, Illya sat in a chair in Phelps’ well accommodated bathroom with his head tilted back, while Rollin lightly rubbed his skin and eyebrows with vaseline and then applied plaster of Paris to his face. There were straws up his nose to help him breathe, and Rollin was speaking to him soothingly the whole time, with the manner of a man used to having to calm unwilling subjects as he went through this unpleasant process. Illya just breathed slowly and rhythmically through the straws and let the voice wash over him. He was not claustrophobic, thank god, but the process pulled back awful memories of that affair when he had been dumped into a huge vat of plaster.

That time he had only survived by dint of extremely fast thinking and luck. He had held his breath and pulled out a cheap ballpoint pen from his pocket, teasing out both ends with teeth and nails. Then he had stuck the empty tube up through the plaster until he had been able to suck in air rather than a mouthful of the foul liquid. That had been a horrible time, and if he had been claustrophobic he would have had a heart attack as he stood in the slowly setting plaster, sucking in painfully small breaths through the tiny tube, trying to keep his chest inflated as the stuff hardened so that he would still be able to move his lungs once it was set. There had been the thought that perhaps Napoleon wouldn’t survive either, that perhaps he would be trapped in this vat, breathing through the straw, until he died of dehydration. He had suffered nightmares for weeks.

‘Hey, are you all right in there?’

Rollin’s hand was on his shoulder, shaking him a little, and he raised his own hand in a thumbs up. He turned away from those memories and concentrated on the here and now, feeling the sensation of the plaster drying slowly on his face, feeling the unaccustomed cool of the air against his scalp.

What the hell was he doing? Why on earth was he doing this at all? His gut clenched and he felt ice run through his veins. Adrenaline surged, and he wanted to scrape the stuff off his face and throw open the door and run and run and run. He wasn’t duty bound to do this. He wasn’t bound to do this at all. This was crazy!

_ There are advances we could make that would benefit millions of lives, and no doubt save millions too, on both sides of the Iron Curtain.  _ Phelps’ voice echoed in his memory. Millions of lives, against his own very small existence. Millions… He clenched his hands hard, and Rollin asked again, ‘Are you sure you’re all right? It won’t be much longer. It’s a very quick-setting formula.’

He raised his hand again, but he couldn’t quite stop the slight tremor as he did so. Rollin caught Illya’s hand in his, and he fought not to flinch away. He had to trust this man, had to trust all the team.

‘You know, Cinnamon is so claustrophobic I had to sedate her to take her cast the first time,’ Rollin said in a conversational tone, keeping hold of his hand, moving his fingers just enough so that he was almost stroking it. ‘I have that one mask of her, and if I ever have to do it again I’ll have to sedate her again. It’s a funny business this. A lot of the people I do aren’t conscious. On the other side, you know. And there are ones I can’t do at all. I have to make a mould from photos, and that’s so much harder. I studied art for a while, thought about being a cartoonist, then about being a sculptor. It serves me well in this job. Ah, I think we’re ready...’

Hands joggled the set plaster over his face, and as it was lifted away Illya drew in a heaving breath, blinking in the sudden light and feeling rather ashamed at the level of relief that flooded over him.

‘I was – once dropped into a vat of plaster,’ he admitted, ‘and it set while I was in there.’

Rollin whistled. ‘Don’t even mention that to Cinnamon,’ he said in a low voice, with a conspiratorial smile. Illya felt warmed. He didn’t know how the man had done it, but with his constant soothing chatter he had helped to keep the anxiety from peaking into panic. ‘You should have told me before I started.’

Illya shrugged. ‘It would have made no difference.’

He moved over to the basin, scrubbed his face and eyebrows hard with soap and warm water, and then towelled himself off. He pulled the black cap back on before coming over to look at the cast that Rollin had made.’

‘You’ll make a positive from that negative, then?’

‘Mmm-hmm,’ Rollin said, turning the cast in his hands and looking into it intently. ‘Then use it to mould the appliances so they’ll fit directly on your face. It’s not much. Mostly a little around the nose and brow. If you peel off the brow piece four or five days in, then the nose one a few days after that, they’ll never realise what’s happened. They might think you look a bit altered but they’ll put it down to weight loss or the changes that – well, that a man undergoes on a journey like that.’

Illya felt the ice in his veins again, but he nodded and spoke in a level voice. ‘What will I do with the pieces I remove?’

‘Tread them into the floor. They’ll get dirty and blend in and they’ll disintegrate before anyone sees them. It won’t be a problem.’

Illya nodded sharply. ‘Well, I will leave you to it,’ he said, bending in a slight bow of thanks. ‘I have to speak with Mr Collier about the communicator.’

‘Of course. Of course,’ Rollin nodded, looking back at the cast now with the abstracted expression of a true artist.

Illya looked into the strange death mask of his own face one last time, and left.

  


((O))

  


That night he lay close with Napoleon again in Napoleon’s queen size bed, pressing against him as if it were his last chance to share that warmth and love. Their love-making had been soft, unhurried, tender, and it would probably be their last chance to share that kind of love for a long time. Afterwards Napoleon had held him and Illya had clung back as if he were drowning, wanting to spill all of his fears, but holding back for Napoleon’s sake. Napoleon was scared too. He spoke instead about the semi-claustrophobia that had assailed him as Rollin made the cast of his face, and Napoleon held him more tightly, no doubt remembering his own fear that day when he had thought Illya killed in such a horrific way.

Illya and Barney had managed to pack an extra battery with a slightly longer life into the communicator while they were in Phelps’ apartment, and Barney had promised to fit a tiny earpiece in place of the speaker on an extendible wire. Then he would engrave it with the sentiment in Russian characters that Illya had written out for him. Rollin had promised to devise a cover for it that would enable it to slip in easily and protect both it and Illya’s body, and to sort out the fishing wire and patch. He would also cut and style a wig for Illya to wear on the outward journey so his appearance wouldn’t be suspicious to the authorities, but also would be significantly different to his usual appearance and would fit with his fake papers.

They had gone over all the plans seemingly a hundred times. Phelps had promised that the necessary documentation would be ready for the next day, because both he and Napoleon would have to travel under false identities. No authority must know that they were out of the country. They would spend the day at Phelps’ again tomorrow, before leaving to fly out to Europe in the evening. Phelps’ people would travel semi-legitimately across the border from West Berlin and journey on into Russia. He and Napoleon would fly to Germany and then board a private plane and be dropped under the cover of darkness by parachute some distance over the Russian border. They would rendezvous with Phelps and his team and travel to the Russian town where the switch would be made. And then the fun would begin…

  



	2. Chapter 2

It was cold in Russia. Illya had expected that since it was early winter, but still he wished it could be warmer. The cold had started as he and Napoleon had opened the door of the small plane carrying them and leapt out into the icy slipstream. The cold had continued as they plummeted towards the earth, the air streaming past wickedly in icy ribbons. When each man pulled his ripcord and the parachutes opened, the cold had continued, softened very little by their reduced speed, and when they had hit the ground it had been hard as iron, rough with frost that furred every grass blade and froze the earth beneath.

Napoleon had landed not far from Illya, but he couldn’t see him until he got up and started to move, pulling the dark billowing parachute fabric in as he ran. He could just see the glint as Napoleon uncapped his communicator to call to the plane above, ‘We’re down. Any sign?’

‘Nothing on monitored channels, sir,’ came the muffled reply from far above, and as Napoleon reached his partner he slipped the communicator back into his pocket. Until they met up with Phelps and his team, they were on their own. Napoleon grinned, and his teeth flashed in the moonlight.

‘A little chilly,  _ mon cher _ ?’

Illya shrugged. ‘I’ve been colder.’

‘Well, pity those of us who don’t have your icy Slavic blood.’

‘In 1936, when I was three years old, the temperature reached almost forty Celsius in Kiev,’ Illya commented idly as he packed away his ’chute. ‘That heat is one of my first memories.’

Napoleon shut him up by kissing him, but Illya pulled away, shaking his head. ‘Napoleon, don’t...’

Napoleon reached after him, catching his gloved hand. ‘Illya, please. We don’t have much time left. Don’t push me away now.’

Illya stood in the icy field, eyes cast down to his feet, just making out the dark shape of his boots against the slightly lighter mess of grass and earth. How could he explain his unease to Napoleon? He was about to be incarcerated for exactly what Napoleon wanted from him, and even if it wasn’t in his own name, he still felt such a turmoil of emotion around that, that he couldn’t think of a single word to describe his feelings.

He looked up slowly, looked into the dark glitter of Napoleon’s eyes. Oh, how he wanted him. He remembered their last lovemaking; not, as he had expected, the slow and languid love in Napoleon’s bed, but an urgent shoving and rubbing and mutual stimulation in the aeroplane toilets somewhere over the North Atlantic. There had been icebergs in the sea far below, ice crystallising at the edges of the windows, and Napoleon had just given him that look, one long, penetrating look, and the next thing Illya had known he was in that tiny compartment, pressed up against the bulkhead by Napoleon’s body, head pressed back by Napoleon’s lips. They had held their strident erections together, Napoleon’s hands pressing around Illya’s hands, and had pumped until the climax came, which Napoleon had caught in a bouquet of tissue and flushed into the ether.

The expression on Napoleon’s face as he forced himself to stay silent as he came was the most erotic thing Illya had ever seen. Just now, thinking about it, he was becoming hard. In the freezing field he leant against Napoleon and then kissed him very softly on the lips.

‘I’m sorry,  _ lyubimy _ ,’ he whispered. ‘I love you. I will not stop loving you. But I can’t do that. Not here. Not until it’s over. Please, understand...’

Napoleon’s gloved hand was at the back of his neck, holding him. Slowly the American nodded. ‘I’ll try,’ he promised. ‘I’ll try.’

  


((O))

  


The trek across the fields was cold and largely made in silence, scarves wrapped around their faces to cut out the freezing air and heads tilted down to further protect them from the cold. Illya’s presence beside Napoleon felt like a spirit stalking alongside him. He couldn’t encapsulate it, how he could seem so bulkily present and yet so absent, so frigid and yet like a burning coal at his side. He wanted desperately to reach him, but he didn’t know how, because the way he knew best was to take Illya in his arms and kiss and stroke and coax a response from him, and right now that was making his lover turn even further away. He tried, tried so hard, to understand why this mission and being in his homeland was affecting him like this, but he thought if it had been the other way round he would have wanted to hold his partner and kiss him and make love to him until the last possible moment. Instead, Illya was like a creature huddled inside a shell.

The sky was at its darkest as they finally reached the pre-arranged coordinates, and Napoleon sighed out his relief at the sight of the car there; a grey, battered old thing with Phelps in the driving seat, his knees jutting up, and looking as though he would have welcomed a hole cut in the roof to accommodate his head. He was lit only by the glow of his cigarette as he pulled air through the filter, and then he sank into darkness again as he exhaled. Napoleon and Illya made for that intermittent beacon of light, anticipating if not warmth, at least a slightly warmer chill. As they stopped by the driver’s door Phelps looked up at them with a broad smile on his face.

‘Gentlemen, I’m glad you got here. Any trouble?’

Napoleon glanced at Illya, but Illya didn’t look in the mood to speak at all.

‘None at all,’ he said. ‘You have a plan to get rid of this gear?’

‘Furnace in the bottom of the hotel building,’ Jim said simply. ‘Barney will take it all down after we get in.’

Illya seemed to come out of his self-imposed isolation, looking at Jim’s cramped position and offering, ‘Would it be easier if I drove?’

Jim grinned again. ‘Ah, you get used to it. Get in the back and get out of your gear. You need to be in civvies once we reach the town.’

Illya raised one eyebrow, and Napoleon caught the expression with delight as Jim’s cigarette glowed again. As always, with action Illya was coming back to himself.

‘I know how Russians drive,’ Illya said with cynical humour. ‘Are you sure you don’t want me to take the wheel?’

Jim shook his head economically. ‘Get in the back. I’ve been sitting here for an hour. We need to go.’

Napoleon shuffled in first, and Illya joined him. ‘Tell me, IK, how do Russians drive?’ he asked with a grin.

He couldn’t see Illya’s expression now because Phelps had stubbed out his cigarette and carefully placed the butt in the footwell.

‘Like maniacs,’ Illya replied, and even in the dark he knew his partner was grinning back.

  


((O))

  


It was a relief to be in the safety of the hotel, even if Napoleon and Illya had been forced to shinny up the outside of the building rather than walk in through the front door. It was even something of a relief that the only sleeping accommodation for the pair was a tangle of cushions and blankets on the floor, the other beds already being taken. Officially, Napoleon and Illya were not here. But the less-than-ideal accommodations meant that there was no reason why they could not huddle together for warmth on the narrow spread of cushions in the rather chill room. Rollin and Cinnamon were already huddled together in their bed in a separate room, and Jim went back to his own bed not long after knocking on Barney and Willy’s door and dumping the armful of parachute fabric and drop suits in their arms for disposal.

The suite was almost silent, but for the slight occasional sound of a snore from Rollin’s room.

‘Do you think that’s him or her?’ Illya whispered into Napoleon’s ear, and Napoleon replied without a beat, ‘Her.’

He snuggled his arms around Illya’s chest, spooning him from behind, and they drifted into a deeply needed sleep.

  


((O))

  


Illya was back in his shell the next day, a hermit crab hiding deep inside impenetrable walls. Napoleon watched him at breakfast, picking at his food with uncharacteristic fussiness, before pushing most of it aside. And then Rollin commandeered him for the application of the appliances, and once those thin and fragile seeming bits of artificial flesh were attached to Illya’s face he looked like another man. It wasn’t just the make-up. He really was another man, Napoleon thought. This was a part of Illya he had never seen. As he stood there in a copy of Lagoshin’s tired winter clothes and Rollin moved about him holding a photograph and checking every last detail, the Illya Napoleon knew seemed to have retreated deep inside, leaving only this facsimile of a stranger.

Rollin fussed and tutted, touching a hand to the stubble on Illya’s chin – he hadn’t shaved since they left New York – and the soft fuzz on his shaven scalp. He altered minute details of appliances and clothes, tutted again, altered again, then finally stood back, a broad smile coming onto his face like a slow opening flower.

‘Jim?’ he asked, turning to Phelps.

Jim took the photograph and walked around Illya himself, while Illya stood like a waxwork, his eyes far away.

‘Very good, Rollin,’ Jim said eventually, and Rollin beamed like a child under a parent’s praise. ‘Napoleon, what do you think?’

Napoleon started, then cleared his throat awkwardly. ‘Oh, I, er – ’

Illya’s eyes came to life, and he half-smiled apologetically.

‘It’s all right, Napoleon,’ he said simply.

‘Do you want a mirror, Illya?’ Rollin asked, and Illya snapped, ‘No.’ But his eyes were alive again when he looked towards Napoleon.

‘Come and look, Napoleon,’ he said. ‘You won’t break me.’

Napoleon had largely avoided looking at the photograph of Lagoshin, but he took it now before looking at Illya, hoping that he would be different enough to reassure him that his very own Russian was still himself. But when he looked at the photograph he saw a man who could have been Illya’s brother. Not quite his twin, but at least his brother. There was just a slight difference of the nose and brow; and when he looked up at Illya he saw Lagoshin standing before him, shorn of head, gaunt of cheek, with fear in his eyes. The sight took his breath away, and he found he couldn’t speak. When he swallowed it was like swallowing a lump of concrete.

‘Perfect,’ he managed after a moment. ‘It’s perfect.’

But Illya’s eyes met his and read the truth.

Napoleon glanced over at the door to Jim’s bedroom, and asked with a lightness he didn’t feel, ‘Can we use your room for a moment, Jim?’

‘Oh, sure, go ahead,’ Jim waved them in, then glanced at his watch. ‘Just remember that we have to leave in half an hour. No later. The timing is vital.’

After a moment of hesitation Illya followed Napoleon into the small, shabby bedroom.

‘I’m not going to ask you to kiss me. I’m not going to ask anything of you,’ Napoleon said in a low voice before Illya could speak. ‘I just wanted to see you alone before you leave. Is that all right?’

Illya smiled slightly, then touched a hand to the appliances on his face as if the movement had felt strange.

‘It’s all right, Napoleon,’ he said quietly.

‘Is it?’

Illya nodded. ‘It’s all right.’

Illya took a breath, then reached inside his top and drew out the fine gold chain he always wore, its slim medallion glittering and twirling on the end like a hypnotist’s tool. He took off the old, thin-banded wedding ring he wore and added it to the little pile of glitter in his palm. He dropped them into Napoleon’s hands and curled his fingers closed around them.

‘Keep them safe,’ he said.

Napoleon locked his eyes into Illya’s. ‘I will,’ he promised. And he hung the chain around his own neck and slipped the small wedding band onto his first finger, where it fitted snugly. Illya had never explained the importance of those items, although he thought the wedding ring might have belonged to his father or grandfather. But he knew how important they were. Illya wore that chain on almost every mission, and no agent would wear something precious or potentially compromising without very good reason indeed.

Napoleon tentatively reached out to cup Illya’s cheek, hoping that amount of touch would be allowed. He just needed to  _ feel  _ him, to feel what was really Illya now he was wearing Lagoshin’s clothes and part of Lagoshin’s face and exhibiting what was probably a fair facsimile of Lagoshin’s despair. Suddenly he felt deeply for Lagoshin as well as Illya, sent into this horrific captivity simply for loving another man.  _ Opushchennye,  _ Illya called them.  _ Degraded _ , he had explained.  _ Crestfallen _ . It was an odd mixture of terms and Napoleon suspected it wasn’t really translatable. But Illya did look crestfallen now, more than crestfallen. He looked lost.

Illya leant in to his touch. Napoleon wanted to ask if he could kiss him one last time, but he was mortally afraid of Illya withdrawing completely. But then Illya came closer, his lips parting a little, and he explained in a husky voice, ‘Rollin says the make-up should stand up to a lot. It has to. This is a good test.’

And Napoleon stayed motionless as Illya’s lips moved to his, to capture them with their heat, and then they both came alive, sharing love and desperation and despair as Illya’s tongue came fiercely into Napoleon’s mouth and Napoleon teased it with his own. Their arms were cinched around each other now, their bodies pressed together hip to head, and finally it was Napoleon who broke the kiss with something like a sob.

‘Oh my god, Illya, don’t go,’ he said, and then stood, stunned at himself, stunned at letting the selfish words slip that he had promised himself would never pass his lips.

Illya’s eyes were so blue they brought tears into his own. ‘I have to,’ the Russian said. ‘You know that, Napoleon.’ He reached a finger up, brushed a little at something on Napoleon’s cheek. ‘I’ve never left make-up on you before,’ he said in an attempt at humour that failed because of the sadness in his voice. ‘Is my face still – ?’

‘Your face is perfect,’ Napoleon promised him, meaning so many things in those four words.

Illya nodded. ‘Good. Now, I have to go out there, Napoleon. I need to go through some things with Rollin.’

Napoleon nodded. When Illya went through the door he couldn’t follow him immediately. He sat down instead on Jim’s bed, rubbing his hands over his face, scrubbing away the tears that he hadn’t let fall. He was an agent, goddammit, and he should be able to mask over these terrible feelings.

He gave himself a few minutes, then joined the others in the main room. Barney and Willy were there too now, and Cinnamon was making a few last minute adjustments to Illya’s clothes while Rollin held something up for Illya to take and spoke earnestly about it. It was the communicator, Napoleon realised, wrapped in a condom, and some diaphanous stuff that must have been the very fine thread and the patch that would keep it from being clenched up into Illya’s gut. He hoped to god Illya was in practice – but then, Illya always kept in practice, whether it was with target shooting, ancient samurai techniques, or the art of pushing contraband so far up his rectum that it wouldn’t be discovered with a simple squat and lift search. It was, strangely, one of the things he loved about Illya; not that he was an expert at hiding things in his gastrointestinal system, but that he was so damn dedicated to every single facet of his job.

He swallowed over his mixture of pride and dread. He didn’t want to let Illya go into this, but he had no choice. He determined to hold on to the memory of that kiss, of Illya’s fire and love. It was the last gift he might ever give to him.

‘All right,’ Jim said suddenly. He was looking at his watch again. ‘We have to go. Gentlemen?’

Napoleon started forward, but he knew he couldn’t come. He was not supposed to be here in this country, and bringing him along to the jail would just be an unwarranted risk. Only Rollin and Illya were going, with Cinnamon along to help.

‘Illya,’ he said.

Illya looked up and met his eyes. Napoleon rubbed his fingers over the gold wedding band on his first finger, and Illya saw that and smiled.

‘Take care, little flower,’ Napoleon said.

Despite everything, there was a brief spark of joy in Illya’s eyes. He grumbled about Napoleon’s irreverent endearments, but he loved them, every one. Illya nodded, but didn’t speak, and Napoleon silently prayed for him to say something, just so he could hear his voice one last time, although he knew that one last time wouldn’t be enough, would never be enough. Loving Illya was like a drug.

‘Goodbye, Napoleon,’ he said, and he walked out the door.

  


((O))

  


It was a good thing, a very good thing, that Illya wasn’t claustrophobic. It was a good thing that he was small. Rollin had told him they had used this trick a few times and it had never failed yet. Somehow, people just didn’t suspect the disabled.

So it was that Rollin was being wheeled into the town jail in a cumbersome bath chair, pushed by Cinnamon in a prim grey skirt-suit. And inside the bath chair, catching tiny glimpses of his route through the patterned wicker weave, was Illya, legs stretched out beneath Rollin’s seat, arms clenched around his chest, breathing in shallow breaths and trying to remain invisible.

The cell they were wheeled into felt small and smelt of damp. The prisoner appeared silent and dejected. Illya could just see him sitting on his bunk, arms wrapped around himself much as Illya’s were. When the door was closed and the lock turned, Illya let out a long breath.

Rollin knocked his knuckles on the edge of the chair, and Illya leapt into motion – or, at least, slowly moved himself into motion, cracking open the back panel of the chair and sliding himself out into the room, while Rollin kept talking loudly in his passable Russian, in his guise as a lawyer making a last ditch attempt to get Lagoshin out. It struck Illya with some irony that Lagoshin  _ would  _ be getting out, would be smuggled right out of the country, while Illya took his place.

In one swift motion Illya slipped up to his feet, noticing as he did that Cinnamon was standing in front of the small window in the door, that Rollin was holding Lagoshin’s gaze as he spoke, with a finger pressed to his lips, and that Lagoshin was open mouthed and mute with astonishment as what appeared to be his twin emerged from under his lawyer’s chair. Illya wasted no time. Lagoshin was an innocent, and as such could not be trusted. He uncapped the syringe he had been carrying in his pocket and plunged the contents directly into Lagoshin’s exposed neck. Lagoshin slumped, and Illya caught him and began to stuff him into the undercarriage of the chair, throwing the used syringe in after him. Then he shut the concealed hatch and seated himself on the bed exactly where Lagoshin had been sitting, folded his arms around his chest again, and looked up at Rollin.

‘Well, I’m sorry, Lagoshin, but there isn’t anything more I can do for you,’ Rollin said in Russian, but his flashing smile between words told Illya that he had done well. ‘I truly am sorry.’

Illya matched the pattern set by his doppelgänger, and didn’t speak. He just looked at Rollin with what he was sure were appropriately haunted eyes. It didn’t take much acting talent. He glanced up at Cinnamon and she gave him a sympathetic smile, but then turned and knocked on the door, calling, ‘Guard, we’re ready to go.’

He was left in the cell. He felt very small despite the cramped conditions of the room, but he wasn’t given long to mull on his situation because he could still hear the rumble of Rollin’s chair moving off down the corridor when the door was opened and he was ordered out by a guard muttering invectives about time-wasting lawyers and how they needed to get to the train before it left without him. Rollin had deliberately left the visit as late as possible in the hope that Illya wouldn’t then be submitted to a search before being taken to the train, and it looked as though his instinct had been right.

It was icy outside, but it wasn’t long before he was hustled into a truck with the name of some bakery in large letters on the outside. On the inside it was a different story, as it was already half full of prisoners. Illya shuffled in and sat down against the wall, disinclined to talk or even to look up. The journey seemed to take hours as they kept stopping and more men were thrust into the space, until it became cramped and unbearable. It was dusk by the time they were unloaded by guards with guns at a railway siding separate from the main station and shouted at to kneel on the ground while a general air of fear and disorder raged around them. Illya knelt on the cold ground, shivering, waiting, as an interminable counting of heads went on.

He eyed the wooden cattle wagon which would be his home for now with a strong feeling of trepidation. When he was finally yelled at to stand his legs almost did not cooperate, but he staggered to his feet, tottering a little on the gravel. He kept his head down and kept his hands limp, and walked up into the lightless interior of the wagon with the rest of the men. There must have been sixty in there by the time the thing was considered full, and he stood uncomfortably, packed alongside his fellow prisoners like a sardine in a tin. Invisible beyond the huddle of men a guard shouted instructions, and he gleaned that there was a hole somewhere in the floor to be used as a toilet, and that at some point they would be given food.

Somehow he managed to move his way towards the edge of the wagon through the other milling bodies. Men were shoving, some were talking, asking names and crimes, and he prayed that no one would ask him. He didn’t want to attract any undue attention, especially the kind of attention he would garner for being homosexual. He moved himself right to the wagon side and leant against the rough wood planks, reasoning that the others would probably try to stay nearer the centre for warmth. He would need the warmth too, but it was better to be cold and left alone.

He pressed his hand over the slimness of the communicator in a deep inside pocket, wishing that he could open it up and call Napoleon, but that would be suicide. The communicator was already modified so that it showed no sign of an incoming signal except a very slight vibration. It was too risky otherwise. If things went as they should he wouldn’t use it at all until he called for the extraction of him and Permyakov. The other option was an unthinkable one; if his position in the  _ zona  _ had become so dangerous that he had to request help. Then the mission would be a complete failure.

  


((O))

  


Napoleon was almost beside himself by the time Rollin and Cinnamon returned, although he managed to coax his visible anxiety down to pacing. When they came in through the door grinning, with a pale and obviously terrified Lagoshin between then, it was all he could do to stop himself rushing them and bellowing at them for information. Instead he just dropped into a chair and waited for Jim to speak.

‘What took you so long?’ Phelps asked as Rollin poured himself a brandy.

‘Prison governor was a little over-zealous and took us up to his office for a long interview,’ Rollin replied. His face was glowing with the kind of joy one only got from a mission that had come very close to the wire. ‘I was afraid Lagoshin here was going to wake up, but he slumbered through the whole thing, thank god. Didn’t come to until we’d ditched the chair and were driving back.

‘And Illya?’ Napoleon couldn’t stop himself from asking that question. He saw Lagoshin look at him sharply, and remembered with a strange bitterness that the man shared the name. But that was all he shared. Here, in the flesh, he didn’t seem to resemble Illya at all. Sure, there were surface resemblances, and with his appliances Rollin had made Illya his twin. But to someone who really  _ knew  _ Illya, knew his spirit and his soul, there could be no mistaking the two.

‘Well, we drove down past the siding where he was due to board. The train was still standing. It might be hours before they move off, perhaps tomorrow morning. As far as we can tell everything seems to have gone off fine,’ Rollin said.

_ Seems, seems.  _ Those words weren’t enough for Napoleon. He instinctively fingered his communicator, but it would be a death sentence for Illya were he to open a channel to him.

‘Are you  _ sure _ ?’ he asked in a voice he barely recognised.

Cinnamon smiled at him. ‘The prison governor showed no suspicion at all. He was just anxious to confirm that we’d been received as we should be. There isn’t any reason for them to suspect Illya, Napoleon. We just need to play a waiting game now for him to get to the camp.’

‘And then?’ Napoleon asked, very aware of how on edge he sounded.

Then Jim smiled. Napoleon was starting to feel that whenever Jim smiled it meant things were all right. The trust he was gaining in the IMF team, and particularly their leader, was priceless in this precarious situation.

‘We managed to get Rollin a place at the camp, Napoleon. I didn’t want to say anything until it was certain. He’s just about fluent enough to get by. So we’ll travel up to the logging zone while Barney and Willy get Lagoshin out of the country. Then they’ll join us up there. Don’t worry. There’s plenty of time.’

It was the plenty of time that worried Napoleon the most. He wasn’t exactly clear on how long it would take for Illya to get to the camp. No one seemed clear on that, because it was impossible to anticipate the delays and bureaucratic hold ups that might interfere with the journey. And the longer the journey was, the more danger Illya was in simply of dying from the conditions under which he was being transported. Illya was healthy, he knew, and while not overweight, had a useful amount of body fat. But thoughts of dysentery and pneumonia and dehydration haunted Napoleon. It was terrible to think of Illya being brought down by something like that, something he had no chance of fighting.

  


((O))

  


The first complication arose the next morning, when Lagoshin refused to go. Napoleon stood staring, trying to grasp what was going on as a torrent of impenetrable Russian left the man’s mouth, while he stood looking between Jim and Rollin and Cinnamon, who were the only ones who could follow him.

‘What is it?’ he asked. ‘What’s wrong?’

Barney and Willy were similarly baffled. Then Jim turned and took the three aside and said in a low voice, ‘He says he doesn’t want to go.’

‘ _Doesn’t want to go?_ ’ Napoleon repeated incredulously. ‘He knows what he was facing, doesn’t he? He knows what – ’ His voice unaccountably stalled, and he coughed. ‘He knows what _Illya’s_ taking for him, doesn’t he?’

‘Yes, he knows all that,’ Jim said with patience that was far beyond Napoleon’s capability. ‘But he – er – he doesn’t want to leave his friend.’

‘His  _ friend? _ ’ Barney echoed.

‘His – special friend. The man he was seeing. He managed to evade identification. Lagoshin doesn’t want to leave him.’

Napoleon stared at the voluble Russian across the room, then back at Jim. He tried, tried so hard, to reel in his impatience, tried to understand the man’s feelings. Would he ever leave Illya behind in this kind of situation?

That thought almost floored him with guilt. He  _ had  _ left Illya behind. Illya was alone right now…

‘Then take him too,’ he said suddenly.

‘Napoleon, all the arrangements are for  _ one _ man,’ Phelps reminded him in a low, terse voice. ‘It was hard enough – ’

‘Barney can make him up documents. Can’t you, Barney?’ he asked, appealing to the man who thus far had had far more dealings with Illya than with Napoleon.

Barney rubbed his hand over his chin. ‘I  _ could _ , Jim. If you can get the extraction team to wait just one more day. Do you think you can do that?’

‘You can’t leave him here,’ Napoleon pushed. ‘You certainly can’t leave Lagoshin here – you know the risk that would pose to Illya – but look at what his – his partner will have to face if he’s implicated too!’

Phelps glanced over at Lagoshin again, then back at the others. ‘Well, we can’t drag him out of the country unconscious, that’s for sure. He needs to be able to walk onto that plane looking like an ordinary citizen.’

‘Have you ever been in love?’ Napoleon asked him. Jim stared at him, and Napoleon was caught by his eyes, blue as Illya’s. Oh, but they were not Illya’s eyes. They were a world from Illya’s eyes. ‘Have you?’ Napoleon pressed.

Jim didn’t answer, but something in his face softened.

‘ _ Their  _ love is no different,’ Napoleon carried on pushing. ‘Would you ask a man to leave his wife behind?’

‘If he had to,’ Phelps said, going back behind a façade again. But then he turned to Barney and said, ‘Get on it, Barney. Start to draw up the documents and I’ll get the necessary details of this man’s lover. Willy, contact the extraction team and let them know what’s going on.’ Then he turned back to the other side of the room, where Rollin was still arguing with Lagoshin, and started speaking slowly and carefully to the man, obviously taking great care with his Russian words. Gradually, Lagoshin started to calm down. His face softened, and suddenly Napoleon saw a ghost of Illya in the man.

He stumbled to the armchair behind him and fell into it, suddenly light headed. He was grateful that the last occupant of the chair had left a tumbler and a bottle of whiskey on the side table. He poured himself a tumbler brim full, and drank it down like water. He felt as if he had been ripped bare, as if he had peeled away a sheath of skin and almost,  _ almost _ , revealed that sensitive, so secret place where he held his love for Illya. His mind spun. What was he, after all? A queer? A fag?  _ Opushchennye _ , as Illya had called it. Was that what loving Illya made him? An object of disgust, a creature so foul that he should be dragged away to a very Nordic hell of ice and snow?

The glass clashed against his teeth, and he set it down, realising that while he had been off in his little void of self-pity the others had been talking, making plans. He felt useless. He was never this useless on a mission. It was his feelings for Illya making him so. But that didn’t make him wrong, did it? Anyone would be the same if the person they loved was in such danger. It didn’t make their love wrong. It couldn’t. There could never be anything shameful in how he loved Illya.

A slim figure sat down in the chair opposite. Lagoshin was wearing Illya’s clothes. It only made sense, since they were the same size, and Illya didn’t need his. But to glance up and see Lagoshin in Illya’s dark trousers and poloneck shirt was like being stabbed in the stomach. The man looked at him and smiled, and Napoleon read days of haunting agony in that smile. But in a small, strange, twisted part of himself he hated Lagoshin. He hated him for looking like Illya but not being Illya, for being the reason why Illya had been chosen for this mission. He hated him for wearing Illya’s clothes and sitting in the chair Illya would be sat in, and looking up at him with eyes that were blue like Illya’s, but were not his.

He picked up the tumbler again, refilled it with a shaking hand, and drank.

  


((O))

  


Illya was terrified that he had lost count of time. It was starting to blend into one long run of pure misery as the train juddered for days through the freezing countryside, stopping occasionally for bread rations to be handed out to the inmates, or for cups of water to be given out. It was the food and water that made it easiest to count the days, because there was one cup of water a day and one hunk of dark bread that wasn’t nearly enough for a grown man. The cold grew more intense daily, and the toilet hole in the floor had frozen over. The whole place stank of shit and piss, the dark air was filled with moaning from sick prisoners, and Illya held on to his bread ration with iron fingers for fear of it being taken from him. He had learnt not to bolt it all at once, but to take small bites from it through the day. In that way the worst of the hunger cramps were avoided.

Sometimes he found a crack or knothole in the rough boards, and he stood or sat by it, either sucking fresh air through the hole or putting his eye to it to spy out at the countryside rolling past. There had been no snow when he had left the town, but the further north they travelled the whiter the ground became. It was almost a relief at first when the train was stopped by snow on the tracks and the prisoners were ordered out into the bitingly fresh air. He pushed snow into his mouth surreptitiously and drank the meltwater. They kept the prisoners low on food and water so they needed the toilet less often, and were quieter and more easily controlled.

Illya watched impassively as a dead body was dragged out and two of the prisoners were given shovels to bury it; but how they would bury anything in this frozen ground he didn’t know. It was a relief to be free of the corpse, though. There was something about travelling with a dead body that pushed the men over the edge.

Then they were ordered to dig the snow away from the tracks, and the relief of being outside turned to numb exhaustion after an hour of digging at ice and snow with his bare hands, in clothes that barely kept him warm enough inside the wagon, let alone outside. The guards hovering around with their breath clouding in the air and rifles ever ready made him nervous, so he kept digging without a murmur of protest, working as fast and hard as possible, actually eager to get back in that stinking prison just to get out of this bitter cold. It was better in the dark, where if he didn’t speak, no one noticed him.

Once back inside he pressed his hands into his armpits and almost wept at the pain that shot through his fingers as feeling came back. The pain was good. The pain meant his hands weren’t dangerously frozen. Most of the other men were in the same position, and he could hear some of them sobbing. And then after some time just sitting on the tracks the train jerked and the wagon started to rumble over the rails again, and he pressed his eye to one of those holes in the boards to see that dark was falling outside. He sank down into a crouching huddle and tried to get vaguely comfortable, resting his head on his knees and trying to sleep.

He dreamt of Napoleon, of being wrapped around Napoleon in his bed, of being warm and well fed. And then the dream started to unravel into a nightmare and he jerked awake, half a breath away from screaming. He saw faint streaks of light through the holes in the boards and realised that he had slept the whole night through. It was funny how exhaustion and stress could make someone sleep in the most terrible of situations. He came blearily to full wakefulness as the wagon door was dragged open and guards came to distribute the black bread. He grabbed at his own shamelessly when it was his turn, broke some off and stuffed it into his mouth, then pushed the rest into his pocket so that he could take the cup of water that was allotted to him. He heard one of the other prisoners asking something about how much longer the journey would take, and he held his breath waiting for the answer.  _ Two more days _ . It would be two more days.

He leant back against the boards, processing that. It seemed harder to think now than it had when he had been back in the hotel, warm and well fed. Two more days. He slipped his hand into his pocket and took out the tiny white tablet concealed there, which would stop up his bowels for a few days. It was a nasty thing to take, but he couldn’t risk losing the communicator through an unplanned bowel movement, and he had been tending towards diarrhoea lately, which was worrying in itself. He slipped the pill into his mouth, and swallowed. He would insert the communicator later, at night when most of the men were asleep, and less likely to notice his contortions in the utter darkness.

  


((O))

  


It had been a month, he thought. Much, much longer than he had imagined the journey being, although really he should have known. He had found out what he could about his likely fate before leaving New York, and he had heard of longer journeys, and worse. At least he had been spared the ships. But it was hard to imagine a journey of that distance taking a month. There had been the stops, scheduled and unscheduled. Once they had spent a day just sitting on the tracks, for no discernible reason. There had been no bread and no water that day, and a man had been strangled for the food he had saved. There had been a day when they had all been transferred to a local prison overnight and Illya had bitten in his breath for the fear of being searched, but he hadn’t. In the end they had been transferred to a different train and a different cattle wagon – and  _ viva la difference _ , Illya had thought, until that wagon too had become fouled and filthy as the last. And then at last the train clanked to a halt and they were ordered out, and Illya didn’t know if it was with relief or terror which he looked on his new home. It had to be better than the wagon. Didn’t it?

He shuffled off the train with the other men, very conscious of the communicator inside him, in its protective cover.  _ What if they find it, what if they find it, what if they find it? _ The thought drummed along with his heart as he walked staggering from the train through a wide gate, over which the legend was painted,  _ Through Labour – Freedom _ . He stood in the freezing yard, legs shaking like a newborn animal, while orders were screamed at them, as they were told to line up in fives, to line up again, and again. The counting seemed to go on forever, as the men grew colder and colder. Some of them were warmly dressed, but some were in rags, and Illya was somewhere in the middle. His fingernails were turning blue when finally they were ordered inside and yelled at to strip off their clothes and throw them in a pile. The room became a pink mass of naked men, all thin, all filthy, all being screamed at to line up again, and Illya kept his head down and pretended he did not exist, only keeping the barest sliver of awareness attuned to the shouting guards so that he would not miss an order. The queue for the washroom lined up the stairs, and he shuffled along with the rest, pretending he did not exist, telling himself he did not exist as he walked into the room, did his best to scrub off the filth and sweat and faeces of the journey, and then stood in line again, wondering what would be next.

As he got closer to his turn he saw the men were being shaved; not just their heads and a month or more’s beard growth, but their entire bodies. One of them protested as he was told to lift his arms, and the guard casually slammed the butt of his rifle into his side. After that he lifted his arms meekly, and spread his legs when he was ordered.

Illya swallowed as it came to his turn. He was glad he wasn’t overtly hairy, like some men, but still, this was intolerable. He tried to look on it as welcome, knowing it was to rid him of the lice that had started to swarm over him not long after first being put in the cattle wagon, but no amount of that logic helped to dispel the dread and humiliation at the dehumanising process that was turning him from a man into a  _ zek _ , a prisoner of the state.

He kept his eyes unfocussed, directed straight ahead, as the razor slipped over his skin, waiting the whole time for the fishing wire taped to the inside of his buttock to be discovered. When they directed him to squat to find if he was trying to smuggle anything in his rectum or beneath his scrotum he was afraid his heart would stop beating, afraid he would collapse to the ground right there and then, waiting for that patch to be discovered.

It wasn’t. And then it was over, he was being shoved onwards, handed clothing with a painted panel with a number sewn onto each piece, B 307, and a pair of knee-length felt  _ valenki. _ He pulled the clothes on over the strange feeling of skin shaved of its hair. The trousers were a little too long, the jacket a little too big. The guard laughed at him for his stature, and he said nothing. He pulled the felt boots onto his feet, and actually started to feel warm for the first time since he had been taken from the cattle wagon.

The process of being assigned to a place in the barracks and given a work assignment was interminable. He was almost fainting with fatigue and hunger, standing dazedly as all around him shouting and ordering and counting went on. A doctor looked at him and pronounced him fit. And then he was standing in front of a desk where a guard sat, and the man was scratching on a piece of paper and muttering, and then he looked up, and –

Illya almost did faint then. Rollin looked at him with no recognition in his eyes, and for a moment Illya wondered if he were hallucinating. But then there it was, just the briefest spark of connection, and he knew he wasn’t entirely alone.

When Rollin spoke his voice was bored, disinterested, no familiarity to give him away. ‘You’ll be assigned to the logging teams,  _ grazhdanin, _ ’ he said. ‘And barrack number five. You’re  _ opushchennye _ , am I right?’

Illya nodded cautiously. Rollin spat, very precisely, and the gob of spittle just missed Illya’s arm and landed on the floor.

‘You’ll have to take a bunk with the other perverts, then. You’ll sit at a separate table to eat. Don’t get above your station.’

His voice was still languid with disinterest, but his eyes gave a different message. Illya’s gratitude was boundless. He was being assigned to a special kind of purgatory, but Rollin at least was making him aware of some of the rules.

By the time he clambered into his bunk, the top right of a stall of four rough wooden platforms near the end of the barracks, his head was dizzy with exhaustion. Other men were piling into the room, talking, some of them even laughing, and the sound was alien to Illya’s ears. He lay still on the sawdust filled mattress, still feeling the swaying of the railway wagon beneath him. Despite the washing and shaving there were lice in the seams of his clothes, and he could feel them now, crawling onto his skin, setting up their unbearable itching again.

He hadn’t realised he had fallen asleep, but he jerked awake to a bestial sound of grunting. He lay there frozen, pressed against the mattress, becoming aware that the bed to his right now held a body, another  _ opushchennye  _ like him. He turned his head sideways and caught the glimmer of the man’s eyes in the semi-darkness. He was awake too. And then his mind deciphered the odd sounds of grunting and then the cries of pain he could hear. On the floor just a few yards away a man was being raped.

Those glittering eyes held his. He couldn’t look away. They felt like a safety net as he heard the grunts increasing in intensity, the wild cry of pain from the man being assaulted, the gasp of completion, and then the shuffling as another man came to take his turn.

‘It happens to us all,  _ grazhdanin _ ,’ came the almost inaudible voice from just below the glitter of those eyes.

Illya couldn’t speak. He didn’t know what to say.

‘You’re new,’ the man continued. ‘And you’re  _ opushchennye _ . I warn you now. When they come, don’t fight them. A week ago Ivan Gregarin died beneath twelve of them.’

Illya licked his dry lips very slowly, and swallowed. ‘Thank you,  _ grazhdanin _ ,’ he said. He slipped a hand out from under the blankets and the man took it, pressed it in a firm hold just for a moment. That was all he was; glittering eyes, a voice, and that hand.

‘Ivan Vdovushkin,’ the man said.

‘Ilya Lagoshin,’ Illya responded.

He lay flat again, pressing his head back into the thin pillow and wishing he could somehow block his ears. As the third man took his place Illya couldn’t stop himself. His stomach muscles clenched, he started to sit. And then Ivan Vdovushkin’s hand caught around his wrist in an iron grip.

‘They will kill you,’ he said in that low, steady voice. ‘But they will fuck you first.’

The fight went out of him. He still had the communicator inside him. He couldn’t imagine the agony that would ensue if one of those men tried to rape him with that inside his body, not to mention what would happen to the mission if they either killed him, or dragged him to the camp commander with the discovery of what he was smuggling. He closed his eyes, tried to close his ears, but after the third man had done his business footsteps stumped away, and all that was left was the sound of their victim groaning and dragging himself back to his bunk.

Once he was confident that those close around him were asleep he hitched up his knees and carefully drew the communicator out of his body. He ran his fingers silently over the worn material of the mattress until he found a place where it was almost threadbare, and he turned a tiny hole into a bigger one with his fingers. Then he slipped the communicator, condom, thread, and all, through into the inside and dug it deep into the sawdust. Like the princess and the pea, he thought he could feel it there, just under his left hip, and he fell asleep again with the thought that Napoleon was there in that slim metal device. He was not alone.


	3. Chapter 3

The ground outside was white with new snow, snow that reflected the lights strangely in glitters and shadows. Outside the reach of the lights dark still pressed hard overhead. For two weeks Illya had risen in the dark and gone to bed in the dark. Part of the walk to the forest in the morning was in the dark, and all of the return. When they were in the forest he revelled in the light that came down into the open clearings, revelled in the occasional glimpses of sun when the clouds obliged, because the little joys of natural beauty were almost the only joys there were. Otherwise, everything was hunger and exhaustion, humiliation, and sore muscles and aching limbs. In the first week the blisters on Illya’s hands from using the saw and axe had been so sore he could barely curl his hands closed, but in the second week they had started to transform to nascent callouses, and he had hopes that today it would be less painful.

‘Have you noticed, Ivan, that snow is not snow white?’ he asked as they walked around the yard towards the mess hall, huddling their coats around them.

Ivan snorted, and his breath steamed in white plumes from his nostrils. He was looking gloomily at the thermometer that hung on the wall, fuzzed with frost.

‘Minus thirty five. No chance of being kept back on such a balmy day. Now, what’s that you say about snow?’

Illya gestured at the ground. ‘It is not snow white. It is blue, it is yellow, it is grey, sometimes almost black, but almost never white.’

‘What are you, a bloody poet?’ Ivan looked over towards the mess hall, where the line was out of the door. ‘I wonder if there will be real oatmeal,’ he sighed wistfully.

It was Illya’s turn to snort. ‘Do they know what real oatmeal is? I’m not sure I do. I haven’t got close enough to a bowl since I’ve been here to even tell if it’s right.’

Ivan sighed. Illya almost found himself laughing. He hadn’t understood in the first few days how anyone could laugh here, but he was starting to learn. One had to snatch joy where it came, and he liked this tall, friendly man who had stuck to him from that first night, guided him when he needed it, and pulled his spirits up when they fell.

He sat through breakfast, swallowing the fish stew as slowly as he dared, remembering that man in War and Peace who knew how to savour what he ate because he had so little. He thought he had learnt all about hunger during the war, but it was twenty years since that time, and apparently his stomach had forgotten. It was never this cold in Kiev, either, and cold ate calories, calories the oatmeal would have provided at least in part. They were too late for oatmeal once the other prisoners had eaten, though, and had to make do with no more than stew and bread. It was just yet another way that the  _ opushchennye  _ were kept in their place. Hunger was a great humbler.

It was too soon between eating and being called for roll call, being subject to the brisk search, and then sent out in rows to march to the forest. It took an hour to walk there on a good day, longer when it had snowed and they had to break their path. Last night’s snow had been enough to coat the courtyard, but wasn’t too thick underfoot. Still the cold seeped through the felt  _ valenki  _ and straight into his toes, into his bones, up into his ankles and aching through his shin bones. He needed to get rags to wrap around his feet, but he was too new and too far down in the pecking order.

He walked alongside Ivan, always aware of the armed men flanking them. This walk was a risky time, and the guards showed it in their nervousness. On the second day someone had made a break for it, and had been shot down in the snow. His body had been left there until their evening return, when the frozen corpse was carried home by two prisoners.

Stupid. It was stupid to try an escape there, where the land was flat and the white was endless. There was nowhere to hide and bullets travelled faster than starved and exhausted men. Even in the forest an escape would be stupid – without outside help. Where would one go?

He raised his head a little to peer at the men ahead. It wasn’t good to raise one’s face to the wind, but he had watched  Permyakov every day for a week and a half, trying to work out an angle to reach him. He couldn’t walk with him, shunned as he was. He had tried to angle things so he could work with him, but Permyakov seemed terrified of associating with anyone who could taint him. He had occasionally tried a word or two in the yard, but the man had moved away as if Illya were a leper.

Every day he tried to make himself agreeable to Permyakov, offering him cigarette butts he had found or reaching out to help him carry a load of wood, but the man walked on with his head in the air, as if Illya didn’t exist. Illya could have slapped him. He had to get his trust before he revealed his purpose. He simply had to. But trust seemed to be a commodity of which Permyakov was in short supply, and Illya supposed he couldn’t blame him.

The man was in his forties, too old for this work in these conditions. On the few occasions Illya had seen him hatless he had seen a broad balding patch in the centre of the shaved fuzz. His cheekbones were high and his eyes grey and sharp with intelligence. With a few more pounds on him, dressed in a suit, with his hair grown back, he would have suited a lab or an office eminently. Here, he was as out of place as a fish in the Sahara.

He stumped on through the snow, internalising a rousing marching song in his head. He glanced at Ivan, knowing he was doing the same. It was a kind of shared morale boost they had agreed on that first morning, when Illya was too weak and exhausted from his month in the cattle wagon, and had started to slip behind on the march. Ivan had named a song and tapped his finger, three, two, one, and in their heads they had started to sing.

They reached the work area in the forest and mulled around for a while, feet stamping, some men trying to get a fire going from scraps of brushwood too small to be used for anything else. Illya longed for that fire, but the first time he had moved towards one Ivan had grabbed his arm, pulled him back, hissing, ‘No, not while the others are warming themselves.’

But as it turned out, there was almost always someone else warming themselves.

He had seen Phelps a couple of times since he had been here, striding in to the logging area in good clothing, looking well-fed and healthy, barking orders. It was too risky to try to speak to him. It was good that Rollin was there at one end and Phelps at the other, but really all they could do was observe, unless drastic action were called for. He ached to speak to Jim, to ask him about Napoleon, to hang on every tiny detail of what had happened while he had been here in this hideous limbo. But he kept his eyes down and kept himself small, even when Jim was around, because changing his behaviour around him would be too suspicious. He had already built a reputation for himself as timid, a push-over, and as far as it was safe he would keep to that.

But today Jim actually called him over, barking his number and beckoning officiously. He carried a small riding crop that he tapped against his leg, and if it had been anyone else it would have made Illya very nervous.

‘B 307,’ he repeated as Illya reached him. Ivan was hanging about very close to him, as if he were meaning to protect him if he needed it. Jim ordered him away snappishly, so Ivan stumped off. Illya saw him heading to secure a two handled saw for their work.

‘Yes, sir,’ Illya replied when he reached him, head down, voice low.

‘Come over here with me, man. I want you to carry some things,’ Jim told him sharply, and Illya nodded. As they walked Jim’s leather boots and Illya’s felt ones crunched on the snow, and Jim asked so quietly even Illya could barely hear over the crunching, ‘Are you all right?’

‘I’ve been better,’ Illya replied truthfully, keeping his head down.

‘Any contact with Permyakov?’

‘I’ve tried. No luck. It’s as if I’m contagious.’

Jim sighed, then tapped the riding crop against his boot loudly, and pointed at a pile of rough logs on the ground by a truck. ‘Put them in there, we want them for the office stove.’

Illya heaved the first log up into the truck. Jim stood very close, watching him, tapping his crop with apparent impatience, although Illya was sure it was feigned.

‘We have to find a way to make him open to you,’ Jim fretted. He almost reached out as Illya struggled with the next log, and then caught his hands and locked them behind his back for a moment. The log dropped and narrowly missed Illya’s foot. He wrestled it up again, and rolled it into the truck.

‘Do you need anything?’ Jim asked.

‘Food,’ Illya said, with a lightning grin as he faced into the truck. Then he said more seriously, ‘Rags to wrap my feet. I’ll get frostbite.’

‘I’ll do what I can,’ Jim said. ‘Any word for your partner?’

Illya’s throat suddenly seemed to thicken. What could he say? What on earth could he say? He wanted Napoleon so badly that it hurt. Then everything seemed to coalesce; the freezing air around him; the hunger in his gut; the exhaustion that made his arms shake; the knowledge that if he took too long about this assignment he might be worked to death, neglected to death, or raped to death. Against that his feelings for Napoleon blazed like a shield. They were all he had. He looked up, blue eyes meeting blue eyes.

‘Tell him I love him,’ he said, and then added, ‘And tell him I’m well. Please?’

Something flickered through Jim’s eyes. Then he nodded, and said, ‘I’ll tell him. And I’ll do my best with his fears.’

  


((O))

  


Jim wrestled with his promise to repeat Illya’s message. It seemed so out of character for the reserved Russian. He hadn’t known him long, but he was sure that a proclamation of love like that could only mean he was desperate, and that made him worry deeply. But then of course this mission was going to affect the Russian. It would affect anyone. He had spent a month in transit in the most horrific conditions, with no more than a night’s rest between arriving and being put to work felling trees in temperatures that plummeted to minus forty. He had dropped a good deal of weight since he had left the hotel with Rollin and Cinnamon, and besides that there was a look in his eyes that Jim didn’t like. According to Napoleon, Illya was prone to brooding, and in Jim’s experience brooding could turn nasty in situations like this. They needed to get him out as soon as possible. If Illya couldn’t even start to make a contact with Permyakov then perhaps Jim could plant a seed…

He mulled over that as he climbed up into the back of the truck where Illya had put the logs. He had itched to help him, seeing how he was struggling, but he couldn’t risk breaking his cover with momentary kindness. He shoved the logs into a rather better arrangement and then jumped down, walked around the truck, and swung himself into the driver’s seat. He shouted to one of the guards, ‘Just taking this back for the office stove,’ then fired the engine into life.

As he drove, away from any other eyes now, he opened his radio and called Barney. He, Willy, and Napoleon were a little more than three miles from the logging zone, ready to come as soon as they were called to help with the extraction. Jim hoped to do it quietly and calmly, but he wanted backup, just in case.

‘Barney, Jim,’ he said economically, focussing on keeping the truck on the road over a pernicious piece of ice. ‘I’ve just spoken to Illya. Is Napoleon there?’

The response was instant. He got the feeling the radio had been snatched from Barney’s hand.

‘Is Illya all right?’ Napoleon’s voice snapped.

Jim held his breath for a moment, then said, ‘As well as can be expected. I asked him if he wanted me to relay anything to you.’

‘And?’ Napoleon’s voice was impatient through the crackling radio.

‘He – asked me to tell you that he’s well, and that he loves you,’ he said, and then let the airwaves hang as the truck bumped on over the icy road.

Finally the silence broke. ‘He –  _ Illya  _ said that?’

‘I promised to tell you,’ Jim said. He didn’t want to get into a discussion about the deeper meaning of the Russian’s words. Not here, while he was fighting the truck along a terrible road, and only had the time it would take to get back to the office and unload the wood, before he would need to turn around and drive right back again. He needed to get a word with Permyakov. He needed to plant that seed.

‘Did he – er – say anything else?’ Napoleon asked.

Jim smiled, deciding to paraphrase a bit for Napoleon’s sake. ‘He said his feet were cold.’

  


((O))

  


In the tent in the forest Napoleon clutched at the radio so hard the edges cut into his hand. He had forgotten he was holding it, and Barney prised it from his fingers and turned it off.

‘That’s positive anyway,’ Willy said, trying to sound cheerful.

Napoleon felt shell shocked. Then Barney handed him a tin cup of liquor, and he swallowed it down.

‘I – er – I’m sorry,’ he said distractedly. He turned to the little gas stove and held his hands out to the heat. It was actually quite warm in this little tent, half buried under the snow, as long as the stove kept working.

Barney clapped him on the back. ‘That’s all right, Napoleon. You – care a lot for Illya, don’t you?’

Napoleon’s eyes rose to meet his. He was so thrown out he didn’t know what to say. His mouth worked, but nothing came out.

‘Napoleon, we guessed you two were queer for each other,’ Willy added in a very understanding tone. ‘It’s all right.’

‘I’m not queer,’ Napoleon snapped instantly, horrified at hearing those words. Then he looked up into Willy’s brown eyes, looked across to Barney’s, and shook his head. ‘Listen, I’m sorry, fellas. I didn’t mean to snap. It’s just – what Illya and I have – it’s more complicated than that. We both like girls, you know. We both do. But we like guys too. Some guys. Each other...’

For all of his protests he didn’t think he could make things sound queerer than that. Willy and Barney were exchanging glances, and Napoleon smiled placatingly.

‘I really didn’t mean to lose my head. It’s just – for Illya to send a message like that through a third party – well... Illya’s one of the most private people I know. He’d never say that to someone else. He’s terrified of anyone knowing.’

Willy and Barney exchanged that look again. Then Barney said, ‘If Jim told you Illya said it, then he said it.’

Napoleon rubbed his hands over his face, then said, ‘Yeah, I know. I just worry that it means he’s scared. Really scared.’

He rubbed his hands over his face again, viciously this time, then jerked himself to his feet. He had to stand slightly hunched in the small tent.

‘Listen, fellas, I’m going for a walk about. I won’t go far. I just need some fresh air.’

‘Okay, Napoleon,’ Willy said, but Barney said, ‘Napoleon, he’s got Rollin watching him at one end and Jim at the other.’

Napoleon turned back to look at him. ‘Yeah. Yeah, I know. But he’s the one in the thick of it.’

He shrugged on his overcoat, a thick Arctic coat over that, pulled on his hat with ear flaps, then gloves and over-mittens. Then he realised he could barely get a grip on the zip pull on the tent door, but Barney reached around and said, ‘Let me help you with that. Just knock when you want to come back in.’

That provoked a little laugh. Napoleon felt momentarily better as he stepped out into the winter wonderland of these deep woods, where every tree held branches bowed with snow. He drew in air, and it burned his lungs, but he was just on the good side of cosy in his many wrappings.

Then he thought of Illya, and the relief of the fresh air turned to pensiveness. He wasn’t sure what Illya would be wearing, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to know. He turned to the view again, the snow-crusted trees and the deep billows of snow on the ground, the animal tracks making deep little holes in the crust. His breath made a frozen cloud every time he exhaled, and he breathed deeply in the freshness. He and Willy and Barney had been cooped up in the tent for days, and there was a decided funk in there.

His ears caught the sound of axes falling over and over far away, and, more faintly, saws rasping. It would have been an idyllic scenario if he hadn’t known the axes and saws were being wielded by slave labour, and that one of those ringing blows or low rasps might have been made by Illya’s tired hands.

  


((O))

  


Illya was stripping off his mittens and  _ valenki _ and relishing the thought of clambering into his bunk, hard and lumpy though the sawdust mattress was. His arms ached as they always did from pulling the two handled saw back and forth and carrying logs. His legs ached from the long walk to and from the logging zone. Tonight his head ached too. He ascribed that to the constantly pressing cold and the gnawing hunger. Someone had snatched part of his bread ration at dinner, and he was afraid of what that meant. So far he had been mostly ignored by the other inmates, but perhaps now they were coming to see him as a target.

The back of his neck prickled uncomfortably as he reached his hands up to haul himself onto his bunk, and he froze. After a moment he turned. His instincts had been good. There was a man just a few yards away, leaning against another set of bunks, just watching him. The man laughed and called over to another group just coming in and stamping dirty snow from their boots. It was the same swarthily good looking man who had taken his bread.

‘Look at him, boys. I told you he was meek,’ the man said.

Illya eyed his number and tried to recall his name. Kuznetsov or something like that. He was a squad leader. He made men do what he wanted them to do.

The other men clumped over to join him, exchanging jokes and muttered comments. Kuznetsov closed the space between himself and Illya and lifted Illya’s chin with a finger. With the other hand he pulled off Illya’s cap and tossed it onto the floor.

‘A right little doll, isn’t he? I bet he whored himself out to anyone who asked.’

Men had quailed before the look Illya currently had in his eyes, but perhaps his malnourished and tattered physical state detracted from the glitter there. Besides, he couldn’t do anything. He knew that. There were twelve of them. Ivan had told him how they had stamped on Ivan Gregarin’s head like a ripe watermelon.

‘If you’re going to do it, just do it,’ he said tersely.

Kuznetsov just stared at him, and after a long, heavy silence, Illya turned back to his bed.

That was when Kuznetsov took him, wrenching his arms behind his back, shouting to his friends. His shoulders seared. If he fought, they would kill him...

Illya closed his eyes as rough hands untied the rope from his trousers and they were stripped off along with his underwear. Then he was slammed onto the floor, his head striking so hard that for a moment everything rang around him. When he opened his eyes he could see Kuznetsov kneeling down between his legs, the horrifying sight of his turgid cock pushing out from his open fly.

Panic took him, and he flailed. Hands grabbed his kicking feet, pressing him down by the ankles. He twisted viciously as Kuznetsov grabbed hold of his wrists, and the man let go to thump his fist hard into Illya’s face. The world rang again, and when he came back to himself his legs had been lifted up against his chest, his ankles were being held, someone else was holding his wrists, and Kuznetsov was holding himself, angling himself between Illya’s legs. He felt him there, his cock pressing hard against his cringing anus. He whimpered and tried to pull back, but he couldn’t move. Kuznetsov pressured, grabbed hold of Illya’s bent back thighs with both hands, and then forced himself in.

He screamed. He couldn’t stop himself. He fought wildly, but the hands around his wrists were replaced with knees on his forearms. Kuznetsov’s fingers drew blood from his thighs, and he kept on slamming against his body, driving in to his full length, his face bestial and contorted as he grunted with each thrust.

Illya pressed his head back hard against the wooden floor, trying to focus on that feeling, on the pain in his forearms and thighs, on anything but that terrible invasion into the heart of his body. But the pain there was beyond anything he had experienced, beyond blocking out. And then, at last, Kuznetsov stilled, jerking his seed into Illya’s body, then pulled out and stepped aside. Kuznetsov spat on him, and the saliva ran down his face.

‘He’s a right little wildcat, but he’s tight,’ he said.

The period of relief was almost too short to register. Another man was taking Kuznetsov’s place, grabbing Illya under the hips and lifting him up and then driving in to the entrance made slick with Kuznetsov’s come. Someone was laughing. One of the men on his arms was laughing.

‘...course he likes it. All the faggots like it, he’s...’

The man on him kept pushing, so hard his arms jerked in their sockets. He could feel his own cock stiff and proud. That was why they were laughing.

‘...yeah, go on, go on...’

His own orgasm was reflex, a small thing. Something hot splashed onto his face; but it made his rapist come too, bellowing.

‘...fucking little whore...’

Another man. The pain dragged on, never dull enough to be tolerable, but wrenching through him in sharp, twisting spasms every time the new man drove home. And then there was the jerking of climax again, rough words spoken, the weight momentarily moving from his body, and then another man in his place.

‘...that’s it, boys. Give it to him. Fucking faggot...’

‘...good lesson for him...’

‘...his place...’

He drifted in and out.  _ This is where I will die _ . He couldn’t help that thought coming. He was going to be fucked to death on the board floor of a freezing barracks. And then he was suddenly angry, blazingly angry. He worked the muscles in his arms but he couldn’t dislodge the men who knelt on them. He tried to jerk his hips, but he hadn’t the strength. A blow rang across his face again, and he tasted blood in his mouth. So he stilled, went limp, and lay there, waiting, as each man took his turn.

And then there was stillness around him too. Stillness and a bubble of silence, outside of which he could hear boots milling, low voices, laughter. There was the noise of water pouring and something hot started to soak through his coat, and he wondered idly how he had come to be in the showers. But then the tang of urine worked its way to his nostrils, and he cringed, closing his eyes. And then there he was, just lying alone on the floor, looking up idly at the electric light that swung from the ceiling, vaguely aware that he was freezing and that he was lying in a sticky pool, and that he was crying without making a noise.

There were hands under his shoulders and he lashed out and almost broke the arm of the man behind him.

‘Easy,’ the voice said. ‘Easy.’

It was Ivan. The man gathered Illya’s underwear and trousers and gently eased them up over his legs. Then he sat Illya up, and Illya winced hard at the pain, staring around himself in a bewildered way as if he could not work out what was happening. Ivan peeled the soaked coat from him and hung it on the end of the bunk.

‘It may not dry by morning, but it’s better than nothing, huh?’

Illya was beyond speaking. Reflex little moans pushed from his throat. He let Ivan help him up onto his bunk and pull the blanket over him as he shivered. He could feel the communicator there, under his hip, and how he wanted to scrabble it from the sawdust and open up a channel and sob for Napoleon to come. He could feel the sticky, slimy mixture of semen and faeces and blood leaking from him, and wished for some way to wash that didn’t mean waiting until the next scheduled bath day.

He turned himself onto his side, trying to regulate his breathing, trying to call on all the techniques that had been taught to him as an active agent to deal with the after effects of torture. Every single one eluded him.

  


((O))

  


Illya limped across the yard to the mess hall, feeling as though someone had impaled him on a fence post last night. He kept his head down, sure that his shame was visible to every single pair of eyes in the place. His coat was still damp, and it stank. His underwear was rough and stinking with filth.

‘Hey, Lagoshin, where’s your horse?’ someone shouted. He glanced up enough to see it was Kuznetsov. One of his companions called out a crudity, and they all laughed.

Illya’s face burned. He tried to normalise his gait, but it  _ hurt _ , damn it. The bruise over his cheek and eye hurt and the bruises around his wrists and forearms hurt, but the pain between his legs was twisting, burning, beyond his experience. He dropped his head and carried on walking, straight into a guard who backhanded him across the face.

He stumbled back, startled, simultaneously apologising and registering that the blow hadn’t in fact been that hard at all, more of a sudden swipe which lost its force as it met his cheek, pushing his face aside instead of hitting it aside. It hurt enough after last night’s blows. He looked up into Rollin’s face. The man’s eyes widened at the sight of the bruising across Illya’s cheek. He must have already noticed the way he was walking, and the taunts of the other men.

‘You should go to the infirmary, B 307,’ Rollin said. Then he picked at the faded lettering on the patch on Illya’s jacket. His nose twitched as he noticed the urine scent that was rising from the coat. ‘And get your numbers repainted or you’ll go to the guardhouse.’

‘Yessir,’ Illya murmured, dropping his head again. Seeing Rollin should have been a comfort, but it wasn’t. It wasn’t at all. He just burned even hotter with shame for having his state exposed to one who knew him.

‘ _ Grazhdanin _ ,’ Rollin barked as he made to move away.

Illya froze, and then turned slowly, terrified that Rollin was going to make more of it. He couldn’t go to the infirmary, not to report rape. They would only victimise him worse when he returned.

‘Look at this,’ Rollin said sharply, grabbing at his jacket and fiddling with the number patch. ‘Here, and here. It’s barely legible, I tell you. Turn round.’

Illya turned, keeping his head down, hiding his confusion as Rollin tugged at his clothing and barked at him for his slovenliness in not keeping his numbers properly visible. He was still confused as he limped away, trying to catch up with the other men going for breakfast.  _ Opushchennye _ got the worst of it as it was, sitting at a separate table and always eating last. If the food ran out by the time they got there, there was nothing to be done about it. But as he walked he gradually became aware of a weight inside his jacket that had not been there before. He surreptitiously slipped his hand out of his mitten and into his jacket, and felt the dry, solid mass of black bread against his chest. It was a  _ big _ bit of bread, good and heavy. He would have to eat it or hide it before they left for the work site, or it would be taken from him. Sometimes men stole or hoarded bread when they meant to try to escape.

He wondered if he could push half of it into his mattress where the communicator was hidden. Yes, he would do that. He broke some off and pushed it into his mouth, chewing very slowly so the jaw movement wasn’t obvious, and got into the queue for breakfast.

There was still stew, but almost all the oatmeal was gone. But never mind. He had the bread. His affection for Rollin swelled so hard it almost brought tears to his eyes. Rollin had brought him bread. It was better than gold. What use was gold for an empty stomach or a cold body, anyway? You couldn’t eat it or wear it. Sometimes he collected cigarette butts he found, swiping them from the ground before anyone else saw – because if someone else saw him going for one they would knock him away or beat him up for it. Because he didn’t smoke he could hoard them and then swap them with other prisoners, more fortunate prisoners, for scraps of food. But he was afraid that wouldn’t last long. The men would get to realise they could just hold him down and take the butts, and probably rape him for good measure while he was down there.

Rollin had given him bread… Something splashed into the meagre bowl of stew and became lost in the mess of fish bones and old cabbage and something that might have been carrot. Startled, he touched a hand to his cheek, and realised he was crying.

‘The first time is the worst.’

He glanced sideways. Ivan had squeezed down next to him on their pariah’s table, clattering his own bowl of stew down. Illya saw it wasn’t quite as full as his own had been.

‘Last of the vat,’ Ivan shrugged, at his look. ‘Now, Ilya. Remember. The first time is the worst. They will do it again. Don’t fight them next time. It only makes it more fun for them and makes it hurt more for you. Just lie there. Pretend like you are dead. And think, Ilya. Think of other things. Take yourself far away. Keep your body relaxed and let them fuck a corpse. They might hit you a bit and try to make you wake up, because there’s no fun in that for anyone. But don’t fight them. Never fight them. After a while they’ll get bored, pick on someone else for a time.’

Illya rubbed his sleeve viciously across his face, realising that the strange liquid was still raining into his stew. Odd. So odd. He couldn’t feel himself crying. He felt almost nothing inside. But there the tears were, salting his stew.

He didn’t look at Ivan, but he reached into his jacket and broke off a chunk of the bread in there. He slipped his hand onto Ivan’s lap under the table, and poked his knee. Like a man long-practised in the art of subterfuge, Ivan reached down and took the bread, keeping it under the table, only breaking off small pieces and then dropping them into the stew when he knew no one was looking. He made no overt sign of gratitude, but he pushed his knee against Illya’s for a moment, then took it away.

Illya’s throat hardened again as he swallowed another mouthful of stew and soaked bread. He had given Ivan almost a third of that bread. Why had he done that? What on earth had possessed him? But Ivan was thinner than he. When he coughed his chest crackled and rattled. He had been here longer, far longer. Nine years, he said, because they kept adding to his sentence for ridiculous infractions, because if the  _ zeks  _ were treated as subhuman, the  _ opushchennye _ were sub-animal. He was nearing the end again, and trying to stay out of trouble, but there were never guarantees.

Illya reached into the back of his teeth to pull out a fish bone, sucked every last thread of flesh from it, and dropped it on the table. He had been squeamish at first, but he had learnt quickly to eat every part of the fish, eyes and all. There was no sense in wasting good nutrients.

‘Time,’ Ivan said suddenly, nudging him hard. ‘We’ll be late.’

Illya took the last piece of his morning’s bread ration, leaving what Rollin had given him safe in his jacket, pressed against his chest. He pressed the bread around the dented metal bowl, soaking up every last morsel from the surface, and stuffed the bread into his mouth. He was still hungry. Of course he was still hungry. But at least he was fed.

  


((O))

  


It was something of a risk meeting Jim like this, but Rollin thought it was worth it. There were some things that were easier to discuss in person than over the radio, not to mention the inherent risks of the radio itself. Sometimes it was possible for a local channel to cut in, or to think oneself secluded only to find someone had been listening through the door. This way, though, no one would overhear. Rollin had put through a quick call to arrange a rendezvous and then had borrowed a small truck and driven it out of the camp. When he had seen Jim’s truck coming the other way on one of the icy, poorly made roads between the camp and the logging area he had skidded and deliberately put the truck in the ditch.

In a flurry of exaggerated arm waving and swearing he got out, kicking at the tyres and banging on the bonnet, until Jim got out to join him, politely enquiring in German-accented Russian if he could help.

‘Ah, German,’ Rollin said with a nod, and Jim explained his parentage in his awkward Russian. ‘Well, then, we’ll continue in German,’ Rollin smiled broadly.

That at, least, was less suspicious than their switching to American-accented English, should anyone happen to catch the conversation on the wind, and they were both fluent enough in German to make the conversation flow easily.

‘What is it, Rollin?’ Jim asked immediately.

Rollin’s face grew very serious. ‘Jim, Illya was raped last night.’

Jim swallowed, and Rollin read his reaction. They had all known it was a very strong possibility, although Rollin thought Napoleon either didn’t know or had chosen to stay in denial over that fact. But it had been two weeks, and they had been hoping.

‘Are you sure?’ Jim asked.

‘Pretty sure. He was walking like – well, like he’d just come in from a hundred mile ride – and he was beaten up pretty bad. Stank of piss, too. He looked awful, Jim. Going by what I know about this place now I doubt it was just one man, and I doubt it’ll be an isolated incident.’

Jim let out his frustration by kicking Rollin’s tyre viciously.

‘This is taking too damn long. But we can’t pull him out, Rollin. We’ve got to get  Permyakov out. Illya knew the risks. ’

Rollin nodded. ‘Although I imagine knowing the risks beforehand and having it actually happen are very different things,’ he pointed out.

Jim took off his hat and wiped his forehead. ‘I don’t like this either, Rollin,’ he admitted. ‘But we can’t do anything. We can’t risk exposing Illya. The consequences would be worse than rape. And we  _have_ to get Permyakov, and get him without risking him blowing the whole thing wide open. It’s the blasted kid gloves approach that’s making it take so damn long, but what can we do? ’

Rollin lifted an eyebrow. Although he knew Jim was right, the look on Illya’s face this morning weighed heavily on his mind.

‘Do what you can for him without compromising him,’ Jim said with a sigh. ‘You said he stank. Can you get his clothes cleaned on sanitary grounds?’

‘I don’t know. I could try, but I’m afraid of exposing him to anything that’ll land him in solitary. We could be here months if that happens, and Permyakov could die in that time.’

Jim sighed again. ‘Do what you can,’ he said again. ‘You got the extra bread to him? ’

‘This morning,’ Rollin nodded. ‘Good timing too. I saw his face when he felt it in his jacket. It was like Christmas had come, poor bastard. I’m still trying to work out how to get the foot rags to him, but maybe if I can get his coat for washing I can slip them inside. Trouble is, they’re likely to do it again. They’re like animals.’

Jim’s face registered his own disgust. ‘They’re treated like animals. Brutalised men become brutal.’ He slapped his hat back onto his head. ‘I’ve been thinking about Permyakov. I’ve ordered him to work with Illya more than once and he’s managed to avoid it. I don’t have as much power over them as I’d like – not as much as the squad leaders. We need to soften him up, and I’ve got an idea. He’s a physicist. Illya’s a physicist too. ’

‘Yes, but the guy won’t so much as look at him,’ Rollin said desperately.

‘Yeah, well, my plan’s this. I want you to come up to the logging zone, and we’re going to stage a conversation...’

  


((O))

  


After leaving Rollin, Jim turned the truck around and drove out to the logging area. He climbed out onto the dirty snow and stalked over to a huddle of  _ zeks _ , who had made a small fire and were warming their hands. Sudden anger welled in him. He didn’t know if these were the men who had raped Illya, but he felt fury for the way almost all of them treated the homosexual convicts. He slapped his riding crop on his boot and bellowed at them to go about their work. Startled, they gave him resentful looks, and moved off.

He stood there in the heat himself, looking about the area. There was Illya, bringing an axe down against the bole of a tree with slamming blows. His stature belied his strength. And then there was Permyakov, on the other side of the cleared space, pulling a saw with another man.  _ And never the twain shall meet _ , he thought fatefully. But he would  _ make  _ them meet. He had to. He would have to go about it carefully, but since Illya had got nowhere on his own, it was time to plan some stronger interference.

‘Lagoshin,’ he bellowed at the top of his voice, and he saw Illya flinch, and then lean the axe carefully against the tree he was attacking. As he walked over he saw Rollin was right. He was walking with an awkward gait, and there was a red and purple bruise vivid across half of his ashen face. He eyed it critically, trying to work out if there were a bone broken under there, but he didn’t think so, or at least not badly.

‘Come here,’ he said sharply, pointing a finger at his feet. ‘Right here.’

He manoeuvred himself so that Illya was close to the fire, and started bellowing at him about the right way to fell a tree, implying that Illya was doing it the wrong way. He just wanted the man to have a few moments of rest, and to be able to warm himself. He hoped Illya understood that. He couldn’t read his expression because his head was dropped, his gaze aimed firmly at his own feet.

‘I’m trying to get foot rags to you,’ he said in an undertone between shouts, and Illya inclined his head just a little. ‘Are you all right?’

‘Yes,’ Illya murmured, but he didn’t raise his head.

Jim raised his voice again, shouted again, waving his hand towards the tree Illya had been working on, and Illya flinched very realistically. At least, Jim hoped it was realistic, not just real.

‘Rollin and I will try to pique Permyakov’s interest in you,’ he said. ‘Not today, but as soon as we can arrange it. As soon as we can get together with Permyakov as an audience. Be prepared to show off your knowledge of physics.’

Illya gave that flinching little nod again, then asked in a low voice, ‘Can I go back to my work, sir?’

Jim felt as if he had been given a blow, just for a moment, just before the understanding crept in. He could feel Illya’s shame. It came off him in waves. He hoped the ‘sir’ had been for show, that the boundaries between his allies and his tormentors weren’t starting to blur. He nodded crisply. ‘Go on,’ he said, then raised his voice a little more to shout at him tersely about how he should hold the axe.

Illya walked away from the heat of the fire without looking back, and Jim wondered if perhaps he had made a mistake. He had wanted him to have a little warmth, a little kindness. But perhaps such a brief sliver of those two things was worse than not having them at all.

  


((O))

  


Illya went back to the tree and took the axe in his hands again. It had been good, beating that sharp blade over and over into the wood of the tree. He put into his efforts all of the force that he would have used to beat off Kuznetsov and his friends. Knowing that he could have killed Kuznetsov with one hand didn’t help at all. He blamed himself for not doing so, for not fighting harder, for not screaming louder. He should have been able to do  _ something _ . He shouldn’t have just let himself be taken like one of the meek, soft  _ opushchennye _ who just lay back and practically asked to be fucked, who got hard and came to show their rapists just how much they liked it...

At those thoughts his mind spun in a whirl of self-hatred. He hated himself for letting himself be raped, for coming to climax under their bodies. He hated himself for thinking those terrible thoughts of the other men who had come here because of their sexual preference. No one here  _ invited  _ rape. Even that handful who prostituted themselves out did it only from desperation, because they were driven to it by their need for food or clothes or tobacco. And he was failing his mission. All the while failing his mission. He couldn’t get within ten yards of Permyakov without him freaking out, and he was failing, failing so badly...

He slammed the axe into the tree again and watched white chips fly. With every blow the percussion rang through his bones and the bruise on his face throbbed. With every twist of his body that place between his buttocks clenched in pain. Just walking to the logging area had been agony, but worse than the pain was the fear. He had heard Kuznetsov talking loudly about the sport he was going to make tonight, and from the way the man had looked at him he assumed he was going to be the target. He didn’t know how to take that, not with the pain he was in. Ivan had told him to just lie back and take it, but he didn’t know if he could.

  


((O))

  


Later he was given the chance to find out, as Kuznetsov bent him over the lower bunk and he lay there with his face pressed against the sawdust mattress, grunts being forced from his lungs as Kuznetsov pushed himself in. The pain of new entry after yesterday’s assault was terrible. He closed his eyes and pressed his mouth and nose into the bed, letting himself suffocate just enough to start feeling warm and sleepy, and then turning his head to gasp in air. Playing with his air pulled him through that first rape, but by the time the second man had taken his place he didn’t think he could do it any more. He was afraid of it going too far. So he did as Ivan had suggested. He made himself utterly limp. His breath came out as dry gasps. And he carried his mind to somewhere far away. At first he tried to think of Napoleon, but quickly he realised he didn’t want Napoleon to be associated with that. So he thought of food. While the second man fucked him he devoured an entire roast chicken. But as the third man entered he started to feel sick, so sick he was afraid he was going to vomit on the bed. So instead of thinking of food he remembered his place, his special place that he had constructed in his first year on the job, when he had been taught about torture resistance. This was torture, wasn’t it? He supposed it was torture. So he thought of white, of non-existence, of floating far away from his body. He drew down a glass wall, shut himself away. He took himself far into the white room, where no one else could come in. By the time they left him he was so far away that it was a shock to open his eyes and come back to earth, and find himself cold and wretched again. The usual occupant of the lower bunk was trying to nudge him off so he could sleep, and Illya stared at him blankly for a moment before he realised what he wanted. Then he scrabbled up his clothes from the floor and pulled them on, and once he was back in his own bunk he tried to find that white void again, because it was a peaceful place.


	4. Chapter 4

The days had started to blend into a terrible grey misery, but Illya thought it had been a month now since he had arrived at this place. There had been four Sundays, he thought, two bath days, and two chances to be shaved. He carried the lice around with him like friends, despite the baths and the shaving. Sometimes he picked them out from the seams of his clothes and crunched them between his fingernails, and felt a kind of power he had at no other time. But then sometimes he felt pity on them, because really he was no better than the lice.

The world outside seemed to be expanding away from him, or perhaps it was shrinking. Anyway, the world was becoming very white. He thought perhaps it was because of the white place he went to when he was raped, but the white place was too precious to leave behind. He went there every night. Every day he dreaded the setting sun and the walk back to the barracks, and then when the men came he found his white room and locked himself in.

Sometimes when he looked up he realised dully that someone had dropped a bell jar over him, and that sounds were very soft and sights were far away. All the colours were gone. He had been wrong to say that to Ivan about the snow. The snow wasn’t all colours at all, and it wasn’t white, either. It was just grey.

He knew he had to move on with his mission. Rollin had said they had spoken to Permyakov, hadn’t he? Spoken in front of Permyakov, whatever it was they said they were going to do. He thought he had. He remembered it had taken longer than they meant it to, but Rollin had said something one morning, he forgot when, about titillating Permyakov by mentioning Illya’s knowledge of physics. But he still couldn’t get close.

He would have to try to talk to his target today. He had to. He had only been here a month and he was starting to fall apart. Talk to  Permyakov, persuade him, get him to understand that the prospect of extraction was real, not just some trick of the establishment. He had been hoping for Permyakov to approach him since Rollin had passed on his message, but  Permyakov still walked by with his nose in the air, probably put off by the stench of stale urine from his clothes as much as the stigma of his position. And Illya feared approaching him. Once he revealed himself he risked Permyakov bolting, betraying him, betraying them all. If Illya were discovered Rollin might be in danger too, Jim might be in danger, they might send out teams and find the others in the forest. God help him, they might find Napoleon, and that thought was more terrifying than any of the rest.

But how to go about it without spooking the man? It should be easy. He thought it should be easy, but something was happening to him, and he couldn’t think. Everywhere he turned were those glass walls of the bell jar, and he couldn’t push through them, barely had the impetus to push through them. There was nothing for it, though. He had to make the contact. If not, he was going to die or go mad.

He sat on his bunk wrapping his feet in the foot rags Rollin had given him. It was good, he supposed, that he had them now. His feet were a little warmer. He knew abstractedly that it was good, but it was hard to separate that word out and give it any emotional meaning. It was just that his feet were warmer, and before they had been too cold. But sometimes men had to make boots from old tyres, so  _valenki_ and foot rags were a luxury, he supposed.

He went out into the yard, and instantly dropped his head so he met no eyes. But he could see Rollin not far away, lolling as he did so often near the well, smoking a cigarette.

He altered his steps so they brought him close enough to Rollin to speak, just close enough.

‘Pair me again with Permyakov in the forest,’ he said, barely moving his lips, his voice a dull monotone

Rollin just barely gave a nod. It could just be a twitch of a neck muscle, but Illya recognised it for a nod. He exhaled slowly, and carried on walking. Then he realised that Rollin had fallen into step behind him.

‘Illya,’ Rollin said very quietly.

Illya gave no sign that he had heard. He supposed he should be incredulous that Rollin was trying to sustain contact, but he couldn’t bring himself to feel that.

‘Illya, you’re depressed,’ Rollin said.

‘Oh, is that what it is?’ he asked without inflection.

‘Prisoner!’ Rollin said then, sharply and loud, grabbing Illya’s shoulder to jerk him round.

Illya met his eyes dazedly, reeling a little. He seemed to have forgotten how to keep his balance. Had he once studied gymnastics? Had that really been him?

‘What are you hiding in your mouth?’ Rollin barked. ‘Open it, prisoner!’

Illya dropped his mouth open without question. He didn’t know what Rollin was doing but he didn’t have the impetus to ask.

Rollin poked a finger into his mouth, tilting his head up. Then Illya felt something against his tongue.

‘All right,’ Rollin said grudgingly, as if disappointed that Illya had nothing there. Then he said very quietly, ‘Swallow it. It will help.’

Illya swallowed, and carried on into the mess hall to get his food.

  


((O))

  


Perhaps the tablet helped, whatever it was. It was hard to be sure of anything, but he felt he had a little more energy, that he saw more colours in the snow. Ivan spoke to him on the march to the forest, and Illya spoke back, but he still didn’t really feel as if those sounds outside his ears were connected to him in any way.

He stamped the snow from the tops of his boots in the clearing and then stood there as his squad leader started to give out directions for the work. He was telling Ivan and Illya to start loading logs onto the low trailer that would take them to the river. But then Phelps was there, striding over, barking different orders. His face was a mask of fury when Permyakov argued, but then there was a glimmer of something in Permyakov’s eyes, and he acquiesced. Illya found himself over by a felled tree with one end of a saw in his hands, and Permyakov was holding the other.

Something sparked inside him. This was the chance. At last this was the chance. He was so relieved that tears almost fell. He stepped forward. And then Permyakov sneered, ‘Keep to your end of the saw, faggot. You stink.’

He did stink. Permyakov was right. He gripped his hands hard around the saw and pushed in Permyakov’s direction. Permyakov pushed back. Illya started to set up a rhythm, but Permyakov was jerky and kept breaking it. He had to talk to Permyakov. He had to break through... But he couldn’t think. Why was it so hard to think?

Physics. That was their one link. Permyakov despised him, despised his type. But there was physics. Illya pushed the saw back, and started to speak. The words came to his memory without prompting. He hardly knew what they were. But he was reciting a paper about mesons. The words flowed, and he pushed the saw to their rhythm.

And then Permyakov looked up, as if he had been shot.

‘How – how do you – ’ he began.

Illya carried on reciting, a river of words leaving his mouth. They were comforting. They reminded him of Cambridge, of that cosy time. Sitting in the quad, books up to his elbows, scratching on paper with his fountain pen. The words flowed like tears.

‘Hey,’ Permyakov was saying. ‘Hey, how do you know that? Is it true what I heard them say?’

He couldn’t stop. The words came. They were a blanket. And that blanket expanded to envelop Permyakov. He was starting to push the saw to the same rhythm. He was staring at Illya as if he had gone mad, but he was relaxing. He was absorbing that which was familiar, that from which he had been separated for so long.

‘How on  _ earth _ do you know Dr Kuryakin’s paper off by heart?’ he asked eventually.

Illya stopped as if he had been slapped.  _ His _ paper? Suddenly he couldn’t remember another word, his photographic memory whiting out. Then he said, ‘I  _ am _ Dr Kuryakin.’

He was, wasn’t he? He was Illya Kuryakin, not Ilya Lagoshin. That was right?

Permyakov’s jaw hung slack. ‘I – don’t understand...’

The sense of purpose was like a slap. The bell jar had cracked, and there was sound out there. Permyakov’s eyes were reaching his.

Illya pushed his end of the saw again, and instinctively Permyakov pushed it back.

‘I am Dr Illya Kuryakin. I work for – an international organisation. The West want you, Dr Permyakov. They want you badly enough to send a team in to get you out. I am your contact.’

‘But you’re – you’re  _ opushchennye _ . You’re – ’

Permyakov dropped his end of the saw and walked away. Something rushed over Illya, a roar of abject fear, and he turned away from the fallen tree and vomited. It was over. It was all over. He dropped to his knees in the snow, reaching out a shaking hand to the tree trunk, tasting the bile dripping from his mouth. He pushed snow into his mouth to take away the taste.

He saw feet near him, and looked up slowly. Permyakov had returned, a kind of wild expression on his face. He was holding out his hand and looked as if he were going to babble.

‘Dr Kuryakin – ’

‘ _ Shut up! _ ’ Illya hissed. ‘Do you want to betray both of us?’

Permyakov’s hand was still out, and Illya took it and got to his feet.

‘Get back on the saw,’ Illya told him urgently, and thank god he obeyed.

‘You’ve been through all this – ’ Permyakov stuttered, retaking his end of the saw. ‘I can’t believe anyone would – If you hadn’t been able to recite that paper...’ Then suspicion clouded his eyes, and he stared hard at Illya. ‘Anyone can learn to recite.’

Illya huffed. ‘Then quiz me. Ask me questions. Let me prove it.’

The morning was lost in a litany of questions on quantum mechanics. Illya didn’t understand how he managed to answer them, because he felt dull as a rough stone, but with each answer Permyakov relaxed a little more. Some part of his mind locked away from the hunger and trauma and exhaustion told him the answers, and he repeated them. By that evening, as he trudged back in the dark and bitter cold, he thought he had Permyakov’s trust.

As he walked back into the dark yard he saw Rollin there. The man fell into step beside him as if merely joining the guard as the  _ zeks _ lined up to be counted.

‘He trusts me,’ Illya murmured.

‘Start carrying the communicator,’ Rollin replied.

  


((O))

  


It was late evening, and Napoleon, Barney, and Willy were huddled around the small stove in sleeping bags playing cards and drinking. The tedium of this place was almost unbearable. It had seemed like a winter wonderland to Napoleon at first, when he could thrust his worry about Illya aside, but after a month of sitting here, waiting for news, waiting for action, staving off the cold with alcohol and subsisting on freeze-dried rations, he had had enough. Some evenings it was all he could do not to just burst out of the tent and start off on the eight mile hike to the camp where Illya was being held, to just bust him and Permyakov out of there by force. He was going stir crazy.

He was just a little warmed by the brandy when the radio sounded. They never drank too much, always ready for action. Barney dropped his hand of cards immediately, carefully, though, so their faces couldn’t be seen, and picked up the radio.

‘Barney.’

‘Jim,’ Phelps’ voice crackled through the radio. ‘All right, Barney. Rollin just contacted me. Illya thinks Permyakov trusts him. We need to get a plan for extraction together.’

The relief in Napoleon’s chest was huge. After a month kicking his heels in the tent he felt like suddenly the sun had burst into being. Adrenaline started to rush.

‘We need to get them out without them being shot,’ he said quickly. ‘So they can’t try to slip out of the convoy as they walk to the logging place and they can’t try to slip into the trees.’

‘No, I know,’ Jim said seriously. ‘And we have to extract Rollin too. Don’t forget that. If they realise they had outside help they’ll investigate all the new personnel straight away. Rollin won’t be able to convince them, not under that kind of interrogation.’

Napoleon was inclined to say,  _ damn Rollin, _ but he bit his tongue. That wasn’t fair.

‘I’ve told Rollin to slip out as soon as he can,’ Phelps continued. ‘He’ll rendezvous with Cinnamon and get a truck in the nearest town. Now, this is the plan, so listen up...’

  


((O))

  


Illya lay on his bunk that night after Kuznetsov’s visit, just shaking, trying to pull himself back from that white place. The white place was good, it was safe, but it was a closed room and he was useless when he was inside it. To be able to function he had to drag himself from the white room and let sensation and sound and colour slap rawly at him, no matter how much it hurt. And everything hurt. His mind hurt, and his body hurt so much.

Rollin had slipped him another pill, but he didn’t know if it helped. He needed to pull himself out of this funk, but all he could do was shake. He needed to secure the communicator as Rollin had ordered. He had to do that. But every morning they were patted down before they left for the forest, and every evening they were searched again. Oh, it was so hard to think...

He settled finally on using the thin fishing thread to tie the thing to the inside of his thigh. There were almost a thousand  _ zeks _ to be searched every morning and evening when they came back from their various work assignments, and the guards were rarely thorough. Yes, he would tie it to his thigh, and he could slip it back into the mattress every evening. He would have to judge it well, get it hidden before Kuznetsov came... What if Kuznetsov found it when he stripped off his clothes? He would end up in solitary, he would be beyond help...

He pressed his fist into his mouth to stifle his sobs. He didn’t know what was wrong with him. Sobbing came so easily. He had never been a man who cried. Now he could crush a fingernail of lice and then sob in remorse.

A hand came out of the darkness and folded around his. Ivan. Always Ivan. If he got out of here he would leave Ivan behind.

‘Vanya,’ he whispered. ‘Oh, Vanya...’

He would remember him. He must always remember him. Ivan’s hand stroked his face, gently pulled his fist from his mouth and kissed his knuckles. He clenched his hand so hard it hurt, and Ivan kissed it again.

‘Shush. Go to sleep, Ilyusha,’ he whispered.

He lay awake, eyes hot and staring hard into the darkness above him, until he was sure Ivan was asleep. And then he pulled out the communicator and peeled it from the condom, and for a moment he just cradled it, because Napoleon was in there. Then he slipped his trousers down and tied the thing hard to his thigh, then rearranged his clothes, and tried to sleep.

  


((O))

  


A week passed, a week of tying the communicator to his thigh in the dark of night and then untying it again every evening when no call came. It worried Illya that Rollin had disappeared from the camp. More than that; it scared him. Jim had explained in a clandestine conversation that Rollin had been extracted for his own safety, but somehow Illya could only think of his own safety, how now there was no protecting presence, no one to slip him extra food. But it meant this was coming to an end, didn’t it? It meant it was going to be over. He had gained Permyakov’s trust completely over the last week. Permyakov thought he was better than he was, thought he was respectable and intelligent, a man under cover, not a worn-down  _ opushchennye _ who let men fuck him every night. He thought that Permyakov would cooperate when the break came, but still, he hated that Rollin was no longer there.

He was woken by the slight vibration against his skin, and his hand snapped to his thigh as if he’d been stung. He had ripped the communicator from its binding almost before he was properly awake, and was uncapping it, pulling out the earpiece and slipping it in his ear. When he heard Napoleon’s voice he almost sobbed.

‘Illya, you there?’

He drew the blanket over his head, and murmured, ‘ _ Da _ ,’ in such a way that anyone listening might think he was talking in his sleep.

‘Listen, Illya...’ English... God, Napoleon was speaking English. He hadn’t heard English in over two months.

He listened. He would have listened like a suffocating man would take in air. But he had to understand, too. It was so hard. All he wanted to do was have Napoleon’s voice in his ear, and sob out his relief. He realised he hadn’t understood a word. He asked Napoleon to repeat, and the words came out in Russian, and he had to struggle to form them in English.

‘Illya. Listen, Illya, are you okay?’

Oh, but this was hard on his brain. Everything Napoleon said, he had to translate in his head back to Russian.

‘Go slow,’ he said.

Napoleon went slow, outlining the plan clearly and concisely. Illya soaked it in and tried to understand.

‘ _ Zavtra _ ?’ he asked slowly, when Napoleon had said his piece. ‘Uh – Tomorrow?’

‘Tomorrow,’ Napoleon repeated. ‘Illya, did you get it all? Do you understand?’

His voice was thick with worry, and part of him wondered why. Why would Napoleon worry about him, when his life meant so very little? But, oh, Napoleon’s life was everything…

‘ _ Lyubimy _ ,’ he whispered. ‘ _ Lyubimy _ …’

He wanted to crawl into the communicator and come out the other end, and be held in Napoleon’s arms.

‘ _ Illya _ ,’ Napoleon said more stridently. ‘Do – you – understand?’

He opened his mouth wide, gulped in freezing air, let the oxygen shoot to his brain.

‘ _ Da _ ,’ he said. ‘Tomorrow...’

When Napoleon broke the connection it was as if his heart had broken too. He pushed the communicator back into its binding of wire against his thigh and lay there, his heart hammering so loudly he thought it would wake men up. But no one stirred. The night was utterly silent. The cold pressed onto his open eyes.

When they walked past outside the barracks before dawn, clattering metal on metal to wake the men up, he was still awake, and he pulled on his boots and coat and mittens like a man in a dream. Ivan tried to speak to him, but he didn’t feel as if he were there. He was half in that white room, gone away, just trying to dream his way through the next few hours. He could barely swallow his bread in the mess hall, and he pushed it into Ivan’s hands.

‘No, no, I can’t eat your bread,’ Ivan protested, and Illya said, ‘Vanya, please. For me.’

Ivan peered at him hard, forehead creased in worry.

‘You’re sick,’ he said. ‘You should report to the infirmary before it’s too late. They’ll send you out anyway, otherwise.’

‘I want to be sent out,’ he said.

Ivan’s face held that worried look all through breakfast. Illya tried to eat his stew but he couldn’t swallow. He could feel the communicator that held Napoleon hard against his inner thigh. The stew tasted like dirty dishwater. He poured it into Ivan’s bowl, and Ivan looked at him harder still, and touched a hand to his forehead.

‘Ilya, you’re not planning anything?’ he asked.

Illya’s face blanched. Ivan took hold of his hand beneath the table.

‘Ilyusha, you must live through this,’ he said. ‘You will get home. You can’t kill yourself.’

At that, Illya let out a billow of breath, slumping back on the bench. Ivan thought he was suicidal. Well, he didn’t blame him. If it hadn’t been for the plan, he might have been.

‘No, Vanya,’ he said. ‘No, I don’t want to die. I’m just – sick. You’re right. I’m sick. But not enough to be kept back. No temperature, see.’

Ivan touched his head again, and grunted. ‘No, you’re cold as a dead fish.’

‘It’s a headache,’ Illya said. ‘That’s all. I didn’t sleep. Work will make it better.  _ Through Labour – Freedom _ ,’ he quoted the motto from the camp gate, and Ivan hid a snort of laughter behind his hand.

He walked to the logging area feeling dazed and disconnected from things. Ivan tried to encourage him to sing in his head, but he couldn’t remember any of the words. He stared at the rhythmically moving legs and backs before him, and wondered how to talk to Permyakov. He tried to remember if he needed to work with Permyakov. He didn’t want to let go of Ivan for these last few hours. The thought of leaving Ivan behind was like ripping out part of his soul. He knew so little about the man; he never talked about who he had been before the  _ zona _ ; but he knew him so well. He would be leaving him to die, and that made tears sting in his eyes.

He couldn’t let himself cry again. He lifted his head and pretended it was the sheer ice of the wind that was making his eyes wet. There was snow falling. Snow was good. It wasn’t enough of a blizzard to keep them in camp, but it would help cover tracks and disguise movement. Of course, the guards knew that and were extra nervous, but it wouldn’t matter. No, it wouldn’t matter, not with what Jim had planned.

Jim wasn’t there when they arrived, and although he thought perhaps he should pair with Permyakov, he went with Ivan instead. His thoughts whirled on how he could help him. Ivan was entitled to two letters a year, and no one wrote to him. He could send him food parcels. He could arrange all that somehow, he thought wildly, somehow through a third party. But if Ivan was handed more time on his sentence he would die in the camp. He had no doubt.

Suddenly he looked up from his work, his eyes blazing into Ivan’s.

‘Take care,’ he said. ‘Take care and live. Please live, Vanya.’

Ivan stared back at him, and then he thought he could see a grin in his eyes, a grin hidden beneath his face wraps.

‘I take every day as it comes, Ilya,’ he said, and bent back to the saw.

  


((O))

  


The big truck rolled up into the clearing, and Jim got out. His face appeared and disappeared through the whirling snow. He stalked between the men, making comments and criticisms, and then he strode up to Illya and barked, ‘You, come with me.’

Illya smiled at Ivan, held his eyes momentarily. Ivan’s eyes widened, and he knew he suspected something, but the man stayed silent. Illya wanted to say goodbye, but he didn’t dare, so he just touched his fingers to his hat in a brisk gesture of farewell.

Jim got Permyakov on the way back to the truck, and kicked at a pile of off-cuts with his boot.

‘Both of you, load this lot into the truck, then get in. You can unload it at the other end. I’m not getting my hands dirty with this stuff.’

Sometimes Illya felt a blank coming over him, and he couldn’t distinguish Jim or Rollin from the other men who barked orders at him. He just leapt to do whatever task he was ordered to. Then a few moments later he remembered that Jim was on his side, Rollin was on his side. They were there to help. He knew that was wrong. It meant he was losing reality, spending too much time in the white room and pretending everything else was some great long film reel that would eventually run out. It wasn’t good. Jim and Rollin weren’t part of the film. He had to keep hold of that.

He bent down, picking up each rough and ill-cut log and throwing it into the back. Permyakov stood by him doing the same, and Illya could tell he was itching to ask if this was it; but there was a guard standing so close to them, his rifle lax in his hands. If Permyakov spoke it could spell their deaths.

Then Jim came round to the back of the truck and ordered them to get in.

‘I’ll come along,’ their hovering guard said, making to climb up after them.

Jim laughed. ‘They won’t try anything. Not in this weather. It’d be suicide.’

The guard climbed in anyway. Jim met Illya’s eyes briefly as he let down the canvas back of the cover, then he got in and started the engine.

Illya knocked a couple of pieces of wood into a better position, and sat on them. Permyakov did the same. The light was dim in the back, but some daylight came through the canvas and where the cover was lashed to the sides. He could see that Permyakov was shaking. Illya looked down at his own hands and realised he was too.

The truck kept on jolting and jerking along the road, and Illya could feel sickness in his craw. He didn’t know if it were nerves or the slight motion sickness he sometimes succumbed to. He clenched his mittened hands onto two pieces of wood either side of him, and closed his eyes.

The truck lurched, and from the front Jim yelled something about an animal in the road. That was the signal. Illya lifted the piece of wood in his right hand and in an act more instinct than planned, he hurled it at their guard’s head. The man went down instantly, without a sound.

‘Out,’ Illya snapped at Permyakov, snatching up the man’s rifle.

The truck was moving again. When Permyakov stalled Illya grabbed him by the hand and pulled him bodily to the back of the truck. He gave a cursory glance into the whirling snow outside, and jumped, Permyakov tugged behind him.

They fell and rolled on frozen mud and compacted snow, and Illya kept the momentum going, straight off the side of the road and into the ditch. Then he sat up and looked around, and saw movement. Three people, their faces the only colour in white camo, making towards them. When hands grabbed him he saw Napoleon’s face looking down at him, and all self control dropped from him, suddenly and shockingly. Napoleon was urging him to do something but he didn’t know what. Then he registered. He was pulling a white coverall over Illya’s clothes. Barney and Willy were doing the same for Permyakov.

And then they were up and running, away from the road, out into the spreading white wasteland, stumbling over the snow-covered stumps of trees. He was trying to keep up, Napoleon’s hand was like a vice around his wrist, he was slipping and his breath came in gasps that burnt his lungs. He was dizzy, faint with hunger and fatigue, and the white room was calling him. And then they were in amongst the trees, running still. Barney had something in his hand. A compass perhaps, or – no, he thought it was a tracking sensor. They were heading for the point on the display, but he had no idea where or how far. He only knew that he was running and running, and his lungs hurt and his head hurt, and he was terrified, and the white room was the only place where it was safe.

There was a  _ sput  _ of a silenced shot, and then Barney said grimly, ‘If they find a dead wolf, they’ll know we’ve come this way.’

Vaguely, Illya was aware of the great shaggy corpse on the ground – but he could see no blood. He translated Barney’s words in his head just as Napoleon was saying, ‘Sleep darts. They won’t find a dead wolf.’

And they ran on, the snow falling thickly around them now. Illya’s eyes darted about, wary of enemies, terrified not of being shot but of being taken back. But perhaps the alarm hadn’t even been raised yet. Jim wouldn’t have to say anything until he got back to the office and looked in the back of the truck. He saw that Willy was carrying a great white-covered pack on his back, and so was Barney.  _ Napoleon. _ He focussed on him. Yes, Napoleon too was carrying a pack. Shouldn’t he be carrying something? He and Permyakov. It wasn’t right not to be working…

And then they were bursting out of the shade of the trees onto a road that bisected the forest. And there a truck was standing, very much like the one that Jim had driven them off in. And in the driving seat there was –

Illya’s heart clenched. He raised the rifle he had taken from the unconscious guard. Then Napoleon screamed, ‘ _ Illya, no! _ ’ and knocked the rifle aside. Illya stood gasping as Napoleon prised the gun from his hands. That was – No, that wasn’t a camp guard. That was Rollin. He had almost shot Rollin.

He collapsed to his knees in the snow at the shock of that revelation. He curled over himself, the sobs wrenching out of him. Someone lifted him and threw him bodily into the back of the truck as if he were no more than a doll. Arms came around him, and he reached out, falling against Napoleon’s chest, long, formless animal cries coming from his mouth. He tried to speak but he couldn’t make the words come.

  


((O))

  


Napoleon held Illya against his chest as Rollin gunned the engine into life, and the truck rumbled on. Willy was arranging the stacks of boxes in there, pulling out the ones that blocked off the hidden compartment and gesturing them through. On the other side, Cinnamon was there to receive them, grabbing their snow camouflage as they stripped it off, and stuffing it into a crate.

Napoleon had to drag Illya through the box barricade, and then Willy blocked it off with a box so heavy only he could move it. Illya was still making those terrible open-mouthed wails, and he didn’t know how to stop him. He pushed him away a little and looked into his face, stared straight into his eyes. They hardly seemed to see him.

‘Illya,’ he said. ‘Illya, it’s all right now.’

He glanced around at the others, then thought  _ to hell with it _ . He reached out and stroked a hand down Illya’s gaunt cheek, murmuring, ‘Illya, love,  _ lyubimy, lyubimy. _ Come on, honey...’

There was something in Illya’s eyes, some spark of connection. The sounds trailed off and he sat there, just gaping. Napoleon lifted Illya’s chin, leant forward, held him and kissed him, and to his enormous relief Illya responded, making tiny sobbing sounds of need and relief against Napoleon’s mouth. He slipped his tongue into Illya’s mouth, and tasted him. He was – different. He tasted ill, not right. He tasted of bad food and hunger.

Suddenly he became aware that the atmosphere in the truck had changed. He pulled back from Illya and saw Permyakov staring at them as if he had been struck. The man said something in Russian, and Illya recoiled. Napoleon stared at Cinnamon, who was looking at Permyakov with an expression of disgust.

‘Translate,’ he snapped.

Reluctantly she said, ‘It wasn’t nice, Napoleon.’

‘I don’t care,’ Napoleon said in a voice of steel. ‘Translate.’

‘He – made a derogatory reference to Mr Kuryakin’s sexual preference,’ Cinnamon said awkwardly. ‘I don’t know the precise meaning of the slang, Napoleon, but I understood enough.’

After everything Illya had been through to save his hide... Napoleon felt rage swell. He lurched at Permyakov and took hold of the collar of his coveralls, pulling him very close to his face. He glanced at Cinnamon.

‘Translate this,’ he said. Then he looked directly into Permyakov’s eyes. ‘If you ever tell  _ anyone  _ who it was who got you out, we will deny it. No one will believe you. But afterwards, and you won’t know when, I will hunt you down and  _ kill _ you. One clean shot, with a bullet that suggests KGB. Believe that I can do it. We got you out of the gulag. We can do this.’

Then he dropped the Russian scientist, leaving the translation to Cinnamon. He had no doubt she could repeat his words with exactly the same tone of menace, and by the look on her face she had no argument with Napoleon’s sentiment.

He turned back to Illya, who was huddled again on the floor of the truck, staring, trying to catch in his lurching breaths. He stripped off Illya’s white coverall with great tenderness and threw it aside, and then the stench hit him. Illya stank as if he had been bathing in urine for days, the ammonia so strong it made his eyes water. After Permyakov’s utterance Illya seemed to have ricocheted back into his shocked shell.

‘What the – what the hell is wrong with him?’ he asked, trying to get Illya’s arm to bend so he could strip him of the jacket. He seemed almost catatonic.

Barney looked up from helping Permyakov out of his coveralls. He was holding up clothes as if to check that they would fit. They needed to get both men out of their camp clothes as soon as possible.

‘Trauma,’ Barney said, rather unnecessarily. Napoleon knew damn well that it was trauma, but he had seen Illya come from sadistic torture sessions, escape from certain death in a multitude of hideous ways, recover from captivity and drugging and any number of terrible things, and never come out of it in this state.

‘Napoleon.’ Cinnamon’s hand was on his arm, her eyes wide with that kitten look that Napoleon had learnt was only to be trusted in certain circumstances. He could trust her now. ‘Napoleon, he’s been through – a lot.’

Napoleon stared at her. ‘I  _ know  _ that. Don’t you think I don’t damn well know that? What is it? What haven’t I been told? Blast it, this is my  _ partner _ . Tell me.’

Their eyes locked for a long few moments, but then Cinnamon handed Napoleon a pile of clothes and said, ‘He needs to get these on.’

Permyakov was already half dressed in clothes that were padded to make it look as if he were not so thin. Barney was fitting a dark, close-cropped wig down over his shaven head and trying his best to blend the edges as the truck jolted onward. With some carefully applied make-up to hide the grey of his complexion and make him seem a bit more fleshed out, he would be unrecognisable.

Napoleon turned to Illya, tried to uncurl him enough to pull off his ragged shirt. That stank of urine too, mixed with sweat. He would have burnt the clothes instantly if he could.

‘Come on,’ he murmured, trying to straighten Illya’s arm. ‘Come on, Illya. I need you to help me a little.’

Wordlessly, Cinnamon handed him a syringe. Napoleon asked the question with his eyes.

‘It’ll calm him down,’ she promised him. ‘Trust me. I’ve had it myself. It’s good stuff. He’ll be able to function, but it’ll take the edge off.’

Napoleon uncapped the syringe and held it up. The liquid was clear, almost colourless. He stopped fighting to get Illya’s shirt off him and ripped the sleeve to the elbow instead. He kissed that soft inner skin, and then swiftly injected the dose. It took a few minutes, but slowly the Russian relaxed. The tremors that had been running through his body subsided to a few occasional palsies of the hands. He lifted Illya’s hands then and kissed them, kissed each fingertip and each ragged nail. He was far beyond caring who saw.

‘Illya,’ he said softly. ‘Are you ready to get changed now?’

‘I’m – I’m sorry,’ he said. His English was slow and heavily accented.

‘It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter,’ Napoleon soothed him. ‘Are you ready to get changed? Let’s get you out of those clothes.’

Illya looked down at the remains of his camp clothing as if seeing them for the first time. He fingered at the number on the discarded jacket on the floor of the truck.

‘It’s really over,’ he said.

‘We’re not quite out of the woods yet,’ Napoleon told him reluctantly. ‘But yes, this bit is over. You’ll never go back there again.’


	5. Chapter 5

They drove for forty hours straight, Willy and Barney taking turns to relieve Rollin at the wheel in shifts. Napoleon wasn’t asked to drive, and he was glad. He didn’t want to leave Illya, even for a moment. The Russian slept for a good part of the journey, waking only once to down water and rations, but there wasn’t much food left from their time in the woods, and Napoleon was glad Illya slept so much.

He watched him lying there, huddled on a pile of cardboard and clothes, sleeping as if he were on a feather bed. And then sometimes he reached out to touch him, stroking his fingertips down his hollow cheek, brushing a hand over his forehead. Sometimes he looked up and caught Permyakov’s look of malice, but he didn’t stop stroking Illya. At times Illya stirred and muttered in Russian, but never woke entirely. He seemed utterly exhausted.

Napoleon lifted Illya’s arm once and looked at his wrist, so thin the bones stuck up under the skin, a ring of bruises fading just below the heel of his hand as if someone had restrained him, hard. He wanted to see more of him but Illya was curled in his clean clothes, so he made do with face and wrists and hands, and that fuzzed expanse of shaven head. He had seen as Illya changed that his whole body had been shaven, and his mind dwelt on the knowledge of how utterly dehumanised he must have felt.

When they reached the house that Jim had rented he had made to carry Illya in, but the Russian came awake in his arms and struggled, so Napoleon put him down and held his arm as he walked into the shabby place. Illya stood staring around in the light as if taking in the place piece by piece, then asked in Russian, ‘Where can I go?’

That much Russian Napoleon could understand, but he didn’t think he knew exactly what Illya meant. He recalled the plans of the house Jim had shown them so long ago – he had plans for everything – and said, ‘Uh, the bathroom’s upstairs on the left. There are three bedrooms up there, if I recall correctly. I thought we’d take the first on the left, just after the bathroom.’

Illya moved to the stairs and started to climb. Napoleon watched him go, walking like an automaton, not trying to stop the shaking of his hands. He looked between the assembled group, then fixed on Rollin.

‘All right, give,’ he said. ‘I’ve never seen Illya like that in his life, and he’s been through some bad times, I’ll tell you. Now, I was cut off from everything in that tent, but you were on the ground the whole time. So give.’

Permyakov shuffled in his chair, and Napoleon shot a glare at him. Cinnamon would be taking him out in the morning, pretending to be his wife. They would step on an aeroplane and just leave, just like that. It was almost unbelievable how easy it was. Napoleon was glad he was going. He despised the man.

Then Rollin cleared his throat. He glanced at the others, then took Napoleon by the elbow and led him into the tiny parlour. He shut the door and said, ‘Napoleon, in the camp Illya was raped, violently and frequently.’

A blanching cold dropped down over him. He knew his mouth was working but no sound was coming out. And then he said, ‘Wha-what?’

Rollin held up his hands in a placating gesture. ‘Jim and I thought it best to keep it between ourselves. To keep it from you. We were afraid you would have done something – ’

Suddenly the ice turned to blazing rage. ‘You bet your life I would have done something! I wouldn’t have left him in there to – to – ’

‘Napoleon.’ Rollin caught him by both arms, and he realised suddenly how deceptively strong the man was. He stared into Rollin’s grey-green eyes as he spoke. ‘Illya understood the risks –  _ all _ of them. If you’d gone in there you would have endangered everything. If we’d pulled him out before he could get to Permyakov, the whole mission would have been for nothing. Illya  _ knew _ what was likely to happen. He knew more about the camps than any of us. He made that decision. He never asked for extraction.’

Napoleon didn’t know what to say. Rollin was right. But, but…  _ He knew _ , he thought.  _ He tried to tell me, in as many words, without ever saying those words. And I let him go. Oh god, oh god... _

Rollin suddenly had him in a vice like hug, and Napoleon realised how close he was to crying.  _ Illya, Illya... _ Anger and grief clashed inside him. Then he knew where he needed to be.

‘I have to go to Illya,’ he said.

Rollin let him go without a word. At the door, Napoleon turned back and said, ‘Thank you.’

He took the stairs two at a time. He cracked open the door of the first bedroom and looked inside. The light was on, but he couldn’t see Illya. Then he realised he could hear water running, and a strange sound above it, and he darted out of the bedroom and into the adjacent bathroom. Illya was naked in the shower stall, hunched with his knees up and his arms locked around himself, the shower head raining water down over him. He was rocking and keening and scratching his arms so hard that blood ran from his skin as the water poured over his shaven head and down his back and swirled to the drain beneath him.

‘Oh my god, Illya,’ he whispered. He looked around for a towel, but there was nothing in here, not even soap. He ran into the bedroom and grabbed the bedspread, then back into the bathroom to turn off the water and wrap Illya like a child in the thick cloth. He carried him out of the cold room and back into their bedroom, where he placed him gently on the bed and wrapped his arms around him and held him as the sound wailed out of him.

‘I know what happened,’ Napoleon whispered. ‘I know what happened...’

He tucked the bedspread more tightly around Illya’s shoulders and rocked him gently, stroking his hands over his back, whispering with the little Russian he knew, ‘It’s all right. It’s all right.’

Words began to make their way through the wailing, but Napoleon couldn’t understand them, distorted as they were by tears and in a language he didn’t know nearly well enough.

‘I can’t understand you, honey,’ he said, rocking Illya softly. ‘Can you try English? I want to be able to understand you.’

The words came again. Illya’s face was buried against him, but then he started to grasp bits of English. ‘...so sorry, Napoleon. So sorry. Can’t – I can’t seem to – They hurt me... So long... Can’t find the white room. I want the white room...’

‘Illya – ’ he began, then stopped. He seemed to keep saying he didn’t understand and he didn’t want to do it again. And then suddenly he remembered. Illya had told him about it before. It was a technique for lasting through torture. Illya had constructed himself a room, a white room that no one could get into. If he needed to, he took himself there.

‘But they’re gone now, honey,’ Napoleon pleaded with him. ‘You don’t need the white room. That’s why you can’t find it. You’re safe now. It’s your mind’s way of telling you you’re safe now.’

Illya rocked of his own accord, and then Napoleon realised that he was still tearing at himself under the bedspread.

‘No, Illya,’ he said. ‘No, no, don’t do that.’

He unwrapped it and took Illya’s wrists firmly in his hands – and Illya bolted backwards across the bed, pleading, breathing hard, and Napoleon suddenly remembered the rings of bruising around his wrists and realised what they meant.

‘No! Illya, I wasn’t – ’ he began.

He stood up, possessed by the powerful urge to put his fist through something. He held himself for a moment, controlling that urge, and then he came back to Illya, who was free of the bedspread now and pressed back against the headboard. He saw the long lacerations down his arms and on his thighs and across his hollow belly. He had tried to scrape himself raw.

He went to the door of the bedroom and called down, ‘Cinnamon!’

She came at a run, and took one look at Illya through the doorway before turning away, calling over her shoulder, ‘I’ll get the medical kit.’

Napoleon went back to Illya, who was holding himself and rocking again. He sat next to him at the head of the bed, talking to him very gently. He hardly knew what he was saying. He tried to explain what Cinnamon would need to do, and Illya just stared at him through blue eyes, lost and confused.

‘Illya, you don’t need to go to the white room now,’ he told him gently. ‘You’re safe now. No one’s going to hurt you now.’

He looked up to see that Cinnamon was back, with another syringe full of that almost colourless liquid.

‘Give it to me,’ he said, horribly conscious that just as he had told Illya he wouldn’t be hurt, he was about to drive a needle into his skin. Cinnamon handed him the syringe, and he turned to Illya again. ‘Honey, I’m going to give you an injection. It’ll help, I promise.’

Illya nodded, his eyes tracking the movement of the syringe down to his arm. He didn’t flinch when the point entered his skin, but he looked bemused when his eyes fell on the red streaks that he had carved into himself.

‘All right,’ Napoleon said as some of the tension slipped from the Russian’s body. ‘Okay, just lie back there.’ He settled Illya’s head on the pillows, brushing some of the shower water from his eyebrows. ‘That’s it. Cinnamon, what have you got in that kit for these cuts?’

She opened it and perused the contents. ‘He’ll want a topical antiseptic. His fingernails aren’t clean.’

Illya looked between the pair of them. ‘Covered,’ he murmured. ‘Covered in lice...’

‘No, those clothes have gone,’ Napoleon assured him, ‘and I can’t see anything on your body.’

He must have been shaved recently, because there was almost nowhere for the lice to cling. Napoleon could hardly bare to look at his emaciated, bare body, but he forced himself to, taking a smear of the antiseptic cream from Cinnamon and gently applying it to all the scratches on one side of Illya’s body, while she took the other side. Illya moved a hand vaguely, fingers bent as if to scratch again, and Napoleon caught his arm and laid it back on the bed.

‘Now, Illya, I want you to try not to do that, okay?’ he said gently. ‘Don’t scratch yourself again.’

‘No,’ he said. He looked very sleepy.

‘Not an unusual reaction,’ Cinnamon commented, ‘to try to tear the skin off like that. Washing isn’t enough.’

Napoleon looked at her, startled. Even though he knew that she was just as much an agent as he, it still shocked him that she knew so much of the vicious side of the job, and could speak so prosaically about it. He hoped she wasn’t speaking from personal experience.

He looked back at Illya and saw that his eyelids were drifting down, his breathing becoming soft and easy despite the pain that he and Cinnamon must be causing by applying the cream.

‘Here,’ Cinnamon said, handing him a roll of thin bandages.

Napoleon began to wrap the arm on his side, and finished off with a safety pin. Then he lifted Illya’s thigh up to start wrapping the cuts there, hoping that the bandages would stop him from doing it again. Illya half-murmured something, sounding scared, his eyelids coming open. Napoleon froze, suddenly terribly afraid of how this manhandling of his body must feel to Illya after what he had been through. He glanced at Cinnamon.

‘Do you have anything stronger in there that he can have alongside what you just gave him? Something to send him properly to sleep?’

She rifled through the case again, then drew out an ampoule and a fresh syringe

‘This,’ she said. ‘Five ccs. What are you intending?’

‘I want to examine him a bit better,’ Napoleon said, filling the syringe. He quickly swabbed Illya’s arm between two bits of bandage and pressed the needle in. ‘And I don’t want to give him flashbacks.’

‘Do you want me to leave?’

He looked up at her, and she gazed back at him with a small smile on her face. He trusted her.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I want you to help.’

They finished bandaging him, then examined his head, under his arms, and between his legs for any sign of lice, and swabbed him with a topical insecticide just in case. Then Napoleon rolled Illya carefully onto his side and hitched his leg up as if putting him in the recovery position. He didn’t want to look there, but he had to, and he was shocked at the sore, cracked, filthy state of the orifice he had only ever known as clean and sweet.

He pressed a hand over his mouth at the sight, taking a step back and suppressing a moan. He turned to the wall and pressed his forehead hard against the cold plaster, working to suppress the shuddering cries that wanted to come. How much pain must Illya have been in each time he was raped? How could he have endured it?

‘Napoleon, I can do this,’ Cinnamon offered.

He turned around again, blinking hard.

‘We should – shouldn’t we get a doctor?’ he faltered, even though he knew that was impossible.

She shook her head economically. ‘Napoleon, I can do it,’ she said again.

‘No,’ he said. ‘No, I’ll do it. Just – soak a couple of washcloths in warm water, can you? Actually, bring a bowl of water. I’ll get him clean and then we can at least sterilise the outside. He’ll be more comfortable then, when he wakes up.’

He sat there while she was out of the room, eyes closed, trying to remember the Illya he had known with the silken corn-coloured hair, the lithe, muscled limbs, the soft belly and strong chest. It was like having a changeling on the bed before him. He just wanted Illya back.

And then Cinnamon was there, and he pushed aside his thoughts and applied himself to cleaning away the residue of last night’s rapes, perhaps of many nights’ rapes. Illya had obviously been unable to touch the area in the shower or clean himself there at all. But now Napoleon eased the crusted dirt away and swabbed antiseptic over the area, and then applied a soothing cream. Then he rolled Illya onto his back and folded the bedspread over him.

‘We were going to have something to eat,’ Cinnamon offered. ‘Why don’t you let him sleep, and join us?’

Napoleon felt sickened at the thought of leaving Illya to go and indulge in something as frivolous as food. He shook his head.

‘No,’ he said. ‘No, I’ll have something when he does.’

‘He’ll be asleep for a while,’ she warned him.

‘I know,’ Napoleon nodded. ‘But I’ll wait.’

Cinnamon nodded. She packed up the medical kit and left the room. As soon as the door was closed Napoleon stripped down to vest and underpants and slipped under the bedspread, catching Illya into his arms and just holding him while he slept.

  


((O))

  


Illya woke with arms around him and legs around him, and he was  _ warm _ , warmer than he had been in months. The surface beneath him was very soft, the covering above him was soft. Even the air he breathed into his mouth was warm. He lay very still, cautious, trying to read the situation. He was naked, but there was constriction around his arms and legs. What was that? He couldn’t understand. He felt so sore...

He moved a little and breathed in, and then he smelt – Oh god – He could smell Napoleon. That was Napoleon around him, holding him. He moved again and his face touched Napoleon’s skin. He inhaled until he felt dizzy. He sobbed and clutched at what he felt, and then Napoleon’s arms tightened and he said as if in sleep, ‘Shush, honey. It’s all right. Shush, shush...’

Illya pulled back a little way, and swallowed those ridiculous, easy sobs back into his throat.

‘Since when have you called me  _ honey _ ?’ he asked.

Napoleon came awake in an instant, sitting bolt upright and staring at Illya. There was morning light in the room, the blue of light reflected from snow, and it shone over Napoleon’s face and gleamed on his dark hair. Illya swallowed hard, because the tears were so close.

Napoleon leaned forward as if to kiss him, but he didn’t. He just said, ‘Well, you’re sweet, and golden, and – ’ The stock flirtatious look dropped from his face all of a sudden, and he just said tiredly, ‘Since I lost you and got you back again.’

‘Oh, Napoleon...’

Illya fell into his arms again and didn’t try to stop the tears that were seeping into Napoleon’s vest. Napoleon held him and stroked him, and he realised that his arms and legs were bandaged, and there was sore, stiff pain. He remembered it then; sitting in the shower, trying to remove his filthy skin. Something lurched inside him. He felt as if he were falling, spinning, but Napoleon held him more tightly.

‘Hey,’ Napoleon said after a while. ‘Do you want to come downstairs and have a decent meal?’

Illya passed a hand over his own chest, then felt the soft gauze taped on his stomach too. He felt ashamed, ashamed at what he had done to himself, ashamed for what he had let happen in the barracks every night. But – he felt cleaner there, too. There was pain, but not of the same stinging and itching intensity around the outside as it had been.

‘Illya?’ Napoleon nudged him. ‘Or would you rather I brought something up here?’

He breathed in hard, looking around the room. It was an ordinary room, an ordinary Russian room. He had stayed somewhere like this during his last year of his degree. It was resoundingly familiar, wrong, unheimlich. He thought he had left this life behind years ago.

‘When do we leave?’ he asked, almost desperately.

‘Uh – tomorrow, I think, if the tickets work out. Jim should be joining us today. He had to stay back long enough to slip Lagoshin’s details back in place of yours in the camp. Then we drive down to Moscow tomorrow and get the plane. Cinnamon and Permyakov have probably already gone. They were going today. And we’ll get a separate flight to the others, just in case.’

He felt scared then. ‘Napoleon, are you sure they’ll let us out?’

Napoleon nodded smoothly. ‘I’ve looked over our documents. They’re perfect. There won’t be a problem. It’ll be all right, honey,’ he promised.

Illya gave him a look at that endearment, and Napoleon laughed aloud. He seemed enormously relieved at something.

‘Dear, dear, Illya, I have waited so long to see that look on your face that I’m never going to stop calling you that now. Honey.’

Illya just looked at him for a long moment, but then he disentangled himself and swung his legs out of bed. Then he looked down at himself, at his shaven, starved body, and he felt that falling sensation again, the feeling of the bell jar dropping, the void coming down over him. He was very far from everything, he was so small he dwindled to nothing, so large he swelled to fill the universe.

Napoleon caught him as he tumbled, and he snapped back into a world of colour and substance.

‘Hey, are you all right?’ he was asking solicitously.

Illya pressed his hands hard onto the edge of the bed, and nodded. The carpet seemed very far away. His legs didn’t seem to belong to him.

‘Where are my clothes?’ he asked.

‘Oh, let me get them.’ Napoleon went to a small suitcase and opened it up, pulling out various underclothes and a brown suit that wasn’t exactly Illya’s normal style, but would suit the persona in his travel documents. He brought them to Illya and started to dress him, easing each item on carefully over the sore, bandaged limbs and stomach. Illya sat and watched as if from outside himself, watched himself being dressed like a doll.

‘Hey,’ Napoleon said, and Illya jerked his head to look at him. ‘I said, do you want to come downstairs now?’

‘Yeah,’ Illya said.

He walked downstairs holding on to Napoleon’s arm, feeling as though the treads of the stairs were very far away, as if he were twenty feet tall and staring down from afar. Or maybe he wasn’t in his body at all. Maybe he was looking down from a great height, just hovering, disembodied.

When men spoke as he walked into the room he stared at them in bewilderment. Someone clapped him on the arm, and he winced, focussing on Rollin. He looked up into his face and then down at his clothes. He was wearing a normal suit, not a guard’s uniform. He had always known Rollin was not one of them. But then he’d tried to – He frowned. Hadn’t he raised his gun to Rollin yesterday? Was it yesterday?

‘I’m – sorry,’ he said.

Rollin smiled, and American English came from his mouth, not Russian, when he said, ‘That’s all right. Just don’t try it again.’

Rollin made as if to hug him, and Illya stepped back precipitately. Rollin didn’t seem to mind. Napoleon went after him and took his arm.

‘Come on, Illya. Sit down. Have some breakfast.’

He stared across at the table. Jim was there with his shirt sleeves rolled up and tieless collar unbuttoned, just about to start eating. Barney and Willy were already tucking in to something that smelt  _ so _ good. He moved over to the table almost without realising it, and reached out his hand towards a thick slice of ham on Jim’s plate. Jim’s cutlery hovered. He had been about to cut into the ham. Illya caught himself, realising what he had just done. But then Jim smiled and pushed the plate in front of an empty chair.

‘You have it. I’ll go cook some more,’ he said. 

That kindness brought tears to Illya’s eyes. Suddenly he remembered how Rollin had slipped him bread when he could, and the tears were coming thick and fast now. He held his eyes wide, trying not to blink so they would not spill. He sat and stared at the vast plate of ham and eggs and dark bread, and couldn’t believe it was there. He thought of Ivan, who would have eaten his meagre bowl of stew and bread hours ago now, and would be working in the forest already. Then he blinked, and rubbed his eyes furiously on his sleeve.

‘Hey, Illya.’

Napoleon’s hand was on his back, gently patting, and he looked up through blurred eyes.

‘Come on,’ Napoleon said, reaching around him to cut off a morsel of the meat. He pushed it onto the tines of a fork, then came around to crouch by Illya, and lifted the ham to his mouth. ‘There you go. Open up.’

He took in the sweet, salty, melting piece of meat, and saliva gushed into his mouth so strongly it almost passed his lips. Suddenly he remembered what it was to eat, and he grabbed at another piece of ham with trembling fingers and pushed it into his mouth. He cut off another piece with the tip of his knife, swirled it into the yolk of the eggs, and pushed that in.  _ Oh, god… _ He was dizzy with the delight of it. He crammed in bread too, yellow and dripping with yolk. Napoleon slid a mug of coffee towards him and poured cream into it before Illya could start drinking. He watched the pale and dark brown swirl together, then lifted it to his mouth and let the smooth taste of fat spread over his tongue.

He stopped before the plate was half empty, staring in dismay at the food that was left. He couldn’t manage it. He just couldn’t manage it. His stomach hurt.

‘Hey, you okay?’ Napoleon asked, and he realised his lover was still crouching next to him, watching him eat.

‘I’m full,’ he said, wiping his mouth on his sleeve.

Napoleon’s eyebrows rose, but Jim said laconically, ‘His stomach’s shrunk. Never mind, Illya,’ he said with a smile. ‘There’s more where that came from. You can have some later.’

Illya nodded. He saw Napoleon eyeing his plate and realised that he hadn’t eaten himself yet. He pushed the plate towards him.

‘You have it,’ he said, and was suddenly reminded of Ivan so painfully that tears started again.

‘Are – are you sure?’ Napoleon asked, catching his expression.

‘Eat it, please,’ Illya said.

He pushed the chair back from the table and stumbled over to the couch at the side of the room. He threw himself there lengthwise, and closed his eyes. The world was rocking again, his body was performing its odd contortions where he didn’t know whether he were massive or infinitely small. Suddenly he could feel it again, his back against the hard barracks floor, hands on his thighs, someone splitting him open. The world was rocking, rocking, his mind became white. And then he opened his eyes and saw Napoleon eating, Barney passing over the salt, Willy lifting his cup. No one had noticed that for a moment he had been somewhere else entirely.

The sobs threatened to come and he held them in furiously, staring at the ceiling. Napoleon needed to eat and he needed to let him eat. The couch was rocking beneath him like a child’s see-saw, and he clung on with whitened knuckles, trying to stop himself from spinning away.

And then there he was, back again. He looked along the length of his body, saw his chest in its white shirt, the brown tweedy trousers, his feet at the end in thick cream socks. All of that was his body. All of it his. He didn’t understand why he kept hovering above himself and feeling as if he were falling. Why now, now when he was safe?

He glanced over at Napoleon again. He was oblivious. That was good. He made himself sit up, stand up, go back to the table and pick up his cup of cream-rich coffee. He knew the fats in the cream would be good for him. He wished he could have finished the plate of food, but it was impossible. Jim was right. His stomach had shrunk.

He took his cup and walked over to the window. He looked out into a street that was thick with snow, but dirtied in the middle where vehicles had moved. The windows of the houses opposite were blank. The sky was blank white. The ground lurched under him again.

There was an arm over his shoulders. It was Barney.

‘I guess this must all be pretty familiar to you, huh?’ he said.

Illya shook his head, with half a smile. ‘This isn’t like Kiev,’ he said.

‘Well, I guess Russia’s a big place,’ Barney laughed.

‘Yes,’ Illya said.

After a while Barney’s arm dropped, and he was left alone. He put down his cup and gripped onto the windowsill with both hands, trying to anchor himself against drifting away like a helium balloon.

  


((O))

  


The engines of the 707 roared outside the thickness of the fuselage. The plane was moving slowly, taxiing to its take off position, making a ballet of the world outside. Through the window Illya could see other aeroplanes manoeuvring in the twilight, white lights steady and red lights and green lights winking. Men walked casually across the tarmac, waving torches held high. Not far away a pair were unreeling a long, heavy hose and bringing it up to a light aircraft to give it fuel.

He leant his head back against the antimacassar and closed his eyes. This plane felt too small, too tight. There were too many people. Somewhere down the back a baby was crying and the mother was crooning the words of a Russian lullaby, tunelessly.

He gripped his hands hard over the ends of the armrests, and then Napoleon’s hand touched over his, stroking him, bringing him back down. He moved his other hand to brush his fingertips over the cool metal of the safety belt buckle, and they twitched in a reflex need to unbuckle himself.

‘Not yet,’ Napoleon said in a low voice.

He opened his eyes abruptly and blinked at the shock of bright lights and colour in the cabin around him.

‘I need to go to the bathroom,’ he said. He felt as if there were someone sitting on his chest. He thought if he didn’t move he would suffocate.

‘Not yet, David,’ Napoleon said again. Illya was travelling under that name, in the guise of an Englishman. Napoleon had spoken to him very firmly about cultivating his Cambridge accent and not slipping into Russian words. Napoleon looked sideways and must have read something in Illya’s face, because he said, ‘Just breathe. There you go. Breathe slowly.’

A stewardess paused in the aisle, looking concerned, and Napoleon said with an easy smile, ‘Just a little aviophobia. He’ll be all right.’ He turned back to Illya. ‘Didn’t you take your pill?’

Illya just shook his head. He didn’t have any pills, didn’t remember being given any pills; and then he realised Napoleon was making the pills up. He didn’t have the composure to go along with this façade.

‘He’ll be all right once we’re in the air,’ Napoleon said to the stewardess. ‘Maybe once we’re up you could bring a couple of gin and tonics, huh?’

‘Of course, sir,’ she smiled, giving Napoleon the kind of smile he always got from air stewardesses. She spared a smile of reassurance for Illya, then moved on.

The engines surged, and Illya was pressed back into his seat by the sudden acceleration. The tarmac rushed by. Lights became blurs. Vibration increased, increased – and then suddenly the acceleration overcame gravity, and the ground dropped away. The lights below dwindled. Taxiing aircraft became toys. The air hummed with the steady resonance of movement, people started talking again, a cotton mass of cloud blanketed the window, and the seatbelt light went off.

His fingers scrabbled at the belt buckle, and then he was pushing past Napoleon before the man could move for him, almost running down the aisle to the bathroom. His hands fumbled with the door catch, he opened it, and fitted himself in a huddle in the tiny space as he struggled to draw in breath.

He was floating higher than the plane, far away from everything, everything was spinning and dwindling and inflating and there was nothing in the world but white. He wanted to scream but he couldn’t move his lungs, couldn’t move anything...

‘Illya. Illya, breathe slowly. In, and out, in, and out...’

He saw Napoleon capping a syringe and dropping it into the bin. He looked vaguely at his arm and saw his shirt sleeve had been rolled up. There was a bright drop of blood in the crook of his arm. It was getting easier to breathe. He looked at his hands, and they seemed like his own.

‘Again?’ he asked wanly.

Napoleon gave him a rueful smile. ‘Again.’

Illya dropped his head into his hands, started to rub them up to his scalp, remembered the wig, dropped his hands again.

‘I’m sorry, Napoleon.’

Napoleon kissed him lightly on the forehead.

‘It’s all right, honey. Never mind. That shot should see you through for a while. I should have given you one before we boarded.’

‘I thought I would be okay,’ Illya admitted. ‘But I’m not okay, am I?’

Napoleon kissed him again. ‘You will be,’ he promised. ‘Now, are you ready to come back to your seat? Can you manage that?’

‘I wish we’d got first class,’ Illya admitted, but then he nodded, and said, ‘I can manage.’

Back in their seats he sipped at his gin and tonic almost like a normal passenger, although he wished there were more gin and less tonic. Napoleon took a magazine out from the back of the seat in front of him, and flicked through it. Cigarette smoke drifted in the air. Illya looked out of the window and saw the dark arc of the sky above, the fleece of clouds below, the glimmer of the setting sun as they raced to catch it up.

_ Almost normal, _ he thought. None of them knew. All those other passengers on the plane; the businessmen steadily ignoring their seat mates, the elderly couples, the mother struggling with her young children; none of them knew what he was. His skin crawled. He became disgustingly aware of the movement of his sphincter, deep the under the layers of respectable clothing, the vest and long underwear that had been padded a little to disguise his emaciation. None of them knew how vile he was. Even Napoleon had no idea, he couldn’t have, because otherwise he wouldn’t be here now...

  


((O))

  


Napoleon hoped Illya wasn’t aware of him watching him. He was making a good show of reading the magazine. He was a spy, after all – but then, Illya was a spy too, albeit slightly off his game at the moment. He had three more shots he could give Illya between here and JFK, and they would have to change planes in Germany. It was shaping up to be a very long trip.

He hated to think that he had grown used to Illya’s panic attacks or – whatever they were. Napoleon was no psychiatrist and he didn’t know what to call them. But they were frequent, too frequent for his liking. He toyed with the idea of taking Illya straight to U.N.C.L.E. medical when they got back, instead of to his apartment, but he felt as if that would be a betrayal. Illya had spoken with anticipation about sleeping in his own bed. And he wasn’t mad, was he? He was traumatised. Deeply traumatised. But he wasn’t mad?

He stared unseeing at the page of the magazine, then slipped his eyes back to Illya. Illya was tapping his fingers repetitively on the meal tray; but then Illya often did that, didn’t he? He was a fiddler.

Illya lifted his glass, took a swallow, put it down again, and started to drum on the table again. His eyes were very far away, and Napoleon realised there was no point at all in pretending to be reading. He could have been sitting there in a chicken outfit, and Illya would have no idea.

He saw Illya’s mouth move in a moue of disgust apparently unrelated to anything in the outside world. Napoleon’s heart ached for him. He knew that Illya was working through a very complex set of reactions to what had happened to him. He thought it had started even before Illya had left the States for this mission. Some kind of engrained cultural guilt had been playing on him over his perceived homosexuality. He had enough cultural guilt just over enjoying himself, enjoying the capitalism of the West, without the added taboo of sex with another man. From the start he had seen this mission as some kind of inevitable punishment for his sin. Illya was as atheist as they came, as was the country of his birth, supposedly, but these things ran deep in people’s veins.

And then those – those  _ bastards _ had come on the scene, had taken him when he was already exhausted, malnourished, worn down and dehumanised, and had added that extra layer of trauma. If someone could have written down an exact recipe for dismantling Illya’s soul, this would have been it. Napoleon’s pulse began to beat hard in his temples when he thought about what they had done to his beautiful, precious, intelligent, witty partner. He could have executed them without a qualm. He had told Illya over and over in the last few days that he was not dirty, that he didn’t need to feel shame, that it wasn’t his fault. But he didn’t think Illya heard him, or if he did, he didn’t believe him.

He couldn’t bear the separateness. He reached out and put a hand over Illya’s, and Illya looked down in surprise, as if he hadn’t realised the hand was his own.

‘How are you doing, kid?’ Napoleon asked him, and Illya manufactured a smile.

‘Oh, fine,’ he said. ‘Hey, do you think I could have another drink?’

Napoleon wrinkled his face. ‘Best not, with that sedative in your system. Why don’t you have some coffee when they serve dinner?’

‘Because coffee isn’t gin and airline dinner isn’t food,’ Illya said cynically.

In moments like that Napoleon could almost believe Illya was all right. He made plans to just get him home, see whose apartment he wanted to use, get him in the bath, give him food, let him sleep. But then Illya would drift into that strange non-being again, where he hardly seemed to inhabit his own body. Napoleon knew he had spoken about the white room early on, but this wasn’t the same. He, Napoleon, knew about withstanding torture. He’d done it often enough. But Illya didn’t need that now. That was something one used only in the immediate situation. The instructors were very clear about that. If Illya were still retreating there it meant he still felt he was under torture, and the white room was turning into something bigger than it was meant to be.

He had seen the same looks on the faces of Korea and Vietnam vets. They ended up in mental institutions or panhandling on the streets.

His mind changed for the umpteenth time. He would get a cab and take Illya straight to U.N.C.L.E.. He needed help. The staff were sworn to confidentiality twice, once to U.N.C.L.E. and once to their patients. The sooner Illya saw someone, the sooner he would be himself again.


	6. Chapter 6

In the end, after an exhausting journey, Napoleon took Illya straight home. They had gone through hours of paper checking in Germany and he had been forced to surreptitiously sedate Illya again without being noticed under the eyes of three officials, before he broke down in front of them. It was a terrible strain going through these things with a partner one could not trust to brazen it through, especially knowing what Illya would face were they turned back.

Then they had sat on another plane for almost ten hours before they touched down in JFK. Napoleon hadn’t felt that it was safe to sleep and leave Illya to his own devices or even to sleep while Illya slept. He could barely think straight by the time they walked from the plane, and the cab driver had woken him up by blasting the horn when they arrived outside the apartment building. He had fallen asleep with his head on Illya’s shoulder.

‘Your place or mine?’ Napoleon asked, as they stood in front of the building with one small case.

Illya stood staring up at the brownstone edifice as if he could not believe it existed. Napoleon didn’t know what he would do if Illya started to panic. He was so tired he was almost falling down, and he didn’t want to have to give Illya another shot.

‘What time is it?’ Illya asked vaguely.

Napoleon shot a look at his watch. It was still on European time. He subtracted the hours and said, ‘Er – I think it’s five a.m.. But I suppose we feel like it’s breakfast time. I – suppose we should get some – No, the stores will be closed...’

In the end it was Illya who took his arm and led him into the building, and chose to go to Napoleon’s apartment, saying something about it being more likely there would be food in the freezer. It all felt so odd, so ridiculously normal, to be walking into the elevator and taking it up, then unlocking the door and stepping into a place that had that strange sepulchral air that a home got when one was away for a while.

Napoleon collapsed into bed, incapable of anything more, and woke disoriented from a strange, long sleep some time later to the scent of meat cooking. He sat bolt upright, staring around him, trying to work out if it were morning or afternoon and what his body thought the time was, before suddenly realising that Illya hadn’t disturbed him by coming in to sleep, so he must have stayed awake the whole time.

Guilt poured through him for leaving Illya to his own devices for so long. He shot out of bed and through into the sitting room, then he saw Illya through the kitchen door, dressed in his own clothes again, dark slacks and a black turtleneck, with a white apron over the top. He had got rid of the wig Rollin had made for him to travel in. When Napoleon stopped in the kitchen door, catching his breath, Illya turned and smiled, and Napoleon could have cried at how normal he looked.

‘I found sausage in the freezer, but the eggs were off,’ Illya said. ‘I thought I could run out for some bread, now you’re awake. The shops will be open now.’

‘Oh – er – ’ Napoleon didn’t honestly know what to say. Illya seemed so normal, but going by his state on the flight home he didn’t think he should be going out alone. ‘You know, we can manage without bread.’

Illya stared at him incredulously, stripping the apron off. ‘Napoleon, we can’t just eat sausage on its own. I’ll get bread. It’s no problem.’

And he picked up Napoleon’s keys from the counter, scooped up a handful of change, and left the apartment.

Napoleon glanced at the sausage patties frying in the pan, glanced at the door, and didn’t know what to do. Illya seemed fine. But then he had seemed fine before. He had wonderful bouts of normality when it seemed everything was as it should be, and then –

He caught his breath, wondering how long he had been standing there dithering. Despite the sleep he was still muzzy with jet lag. He ran into his bedroom to dress quickly, grabbing his U.N.C.L.E. identification and handgun just in case, yanked the spare keys off the hook, remembered to turn off the gas under the pan, and ran for the elevator.

  


((O))

  


He went first to the little bakery a block away, because that was where he would have gone for bread. But then he remembered Illya was always more frugal than that. He would have gone for sliced at the mini-mart two streets away. He jogged all the way and got to the door at the same time as two New York cops, who were met by a balding man Napoleon recognised as the store manager.

‘I don’t know what he’s doing,’ the man was saying in a thick Bronx accent. ‘He just walks in here and walks around a while, then he stops in front of the bread and – I thought he was just having trouble deciding. We stock a few lines, you know. But he just stands there like a goddamn statue, and then he starts crying. He’s putting off the customers, you know. He don’t speak no English, neither. I think he’s a Ruskie or a Pole or something. Thin guy, you know. Looks like he could use that bread.’

Napoleon caught his breath, but he stepped in front of the officers and slipped his identification out of his pocket, saying smoothly, ‘U.N.C.L.E., gentleman. My name’s Napoleon Solo. That’s my man back there. If you’ll allow me to – ’

The officers looked at one another, and Napoleon prayed that they would be understanding types, or ones who wanted to save themselves the paperwork, rather than the officious types who resented U.N.C.L.E.’s authority. Thankfully they nodded, and one said, ‘If you’re sure, mister. Go ahead.’

‘Uh, yes, I’m sure,’ Napoleon said. He was too worried to smile. He wanted to run to Illya, but he had to play it cool. He waited until the two men had turned back to the door, then made for the bread aisle.

The sight broke his heart. Illya was standing with a loaf in each hand, just sobbing, as if he had no awareness of where he was. When words came through the sobs there were none in English. Customers were staring at him as if he had two heads, an old woman looking as if she wanted to go and comfort him but was too afraid.

Gently Napoleon took the loaves and put them back on the shelves.

‘Come on, Illya,’ he said, wishing he had one of those syringes in his pocket. He put his hands on Illya’s shoulders and gently steered him out of the store. As they stepped outside he suddenly realised Illya must be freezing. There was no more than a thin poloneck between him and the New York winter, and he had no body fat to protect him. He took off his own overcoat and draped it around Illya’s shoulders, then stepped to the kerb and hailed a cab.

  


((O))

  


He should have taken him straight to U.N.C.L.E. when they got in. He blamed himself for being tired, for not thinking rationally. This was more than he could fix with familiarity and good food.

Illya came back to himself in the cab, but he seemed disoriented and confused, and plucked at the coat around his shoulders obsessively, before turning to Napoleon and saying, ‘They had so much bread...’

‘Yeah, well, that’s kinda their job, Illya,’ Napoleon said dryly.

The cab dropped them outside the tailor’s shop, and as they went down the steps Illya stopped suddenly and said, ‘Napoleon, I have sausages cooking!’

‘I turned off the gas,’ Napoleon told him gently, and tugged him down the stairs to the door. He felt as if he were betraying his best friend.

They went through the back of the shop and into the reception, where the girl behind the desk exclaimed and said, ‘Why, Mr Solo, Mr Kuryakin! I was almost afraid we’d lost you.’ Then she gasped. ‘Mr Kuryakin, what happened to your hair?’

Napoleon glared at her. Her eyes travelled down Illya as she suddenly noticed the gauntness of his cheeks and how his shirt hung loose on his body. Illya reached a hand up to stroke the fuzz on his head, looking around as if hoping someone else would answer, and the coat fell off his shoulders. Then he said with something of a half-smile, ‘Everyone kept telling me I needed a haircut.’

The receptionist didn’t seem to know how to react. She looked stricken, and glanced at Napoleon as if in hope of answers. He shook his head subtly, so she just smiled and handed out the badges. Illya fiddled with his anxiously. There was nowhere to clip it on a poloneck. Napoleon picked up the coat and they walked further into the maze of metal corridors. Napoleon could see Illya seeming to shrink smaller and smaller with each step.

‘Did Waverly call us in?’ he asked. He seemed to be fighting to hang on to normality. Napoleon was on tenterhooks, waiting for him to go again. It was only a matter of time. He felt as if he were steering a bomb through the halls.

‘Uh, no, Illya,’ he said. He pushed open the door to the infirmary and Illya suddenly registered where they were.

‘Oh – no, Napoleon,’ he suddenly said, backing away. ‘No, I want to go home. I’m all right. I just need some rest.’

Napoleon grabbed him. Illya had backed against the wall, and a stack of kidney bowls fell to the floor with a crash. That sound conveniently alerted the on-duty nurse, and she came hurrying out asking, ‘Do you need a doctor?’

‘Psych,’ Napoleon said shortly, and she nodded and hurried away.

‘Oh, Napoleon, no!’ Illya protested again. ‘No, just let me go home. Please. I can’t go through it all again! I can’t – ’

He sank down the wall, and Napoleon followed him, kneeling in front of him.

‘Illya, calm down,’ he urged him. ‘Illya, honey. No one’s going to lock you away, but you know you need help. You  _ know _ you do. Please, love, listen to me. You know I love you, but you need help.’

Illya’s eyes were out of focus, his breath was coming fast and short. Napoleon hated himself. He put a hand on Illya’s cheek, tried to reach him, then took hold of his hands.

‘Illya, love, love, listen to me. They’re not going to keep you here. You just need to talk to someone. Illya, my love...’

A hand touched his shoulder, and he turned crimson, recalling just how public an arena this was. It was one of the psychiatrists, Dr Bainbridge, crouching down beside them both. To his credit, he made no reaction to Napoleon’s unguarded words.

‘Mr Kuryakin,’ he said clearly. ‘Can I talk to you?’

Illya’s eyes squeezed shut. ‘I’m all right,’ he said, obviously making an enormous effort to control his breathing, but his hands were like vices on Napoleon’s.

‘I’ve been giving him shots of dextraline all the way home, doctor,’ Napoleon said. ‘They seem to help.’

The doctor turned his pale blue eyes on Napoleon. ‘All the way home from  _ where _ , Mr Solo?’

Napoleon faltered. ‘I can’t tell you,’ he admitted, ‘but if you have any of that – ’

The doctor looked round to the nurse who was hovering nearby, and nodded. She disappeared for a moment, and returned with a familiar looking syringe.

‘You know, this shouldn’t be used for a prolonged period,’ Bainbridge murmured, pushing up Illya’s sleeve and looking for a vein. He tutted at the thin arm with its healing scratches and fading bruises. ‘I should learn to stop asking what you agents have been up to, shouldn’t I? But I’m going to have to know  _ something _ , Mr Solo. This man shows signs of both external and self abuse, he is almost dangerously thin, and he’s obviously suffering from some kind of psychosis. Going by the haircut I’ll assume he’s been incarcerated somewhere rather than held at the hands of your average Thrush lunatic. At some point during the process of fixing him he will have to tell me about it, so why don’t you help both him and me by starting it off?’

_ Fixing him.  _ Those words filled Napoleon with an incomparable relief. Illya could be fixed...

Illya looked a little more relaxed now. His iron grip on Napoleon’s hands had lessened. He looked between Napoleon and Bainbridge and smiled.

‘He’s right, you know,’ he murmured. ‘I’ll have to tell him something. So why don’t you tell him the worst of it first?’

Napoleon stared at him, then asked rather bleakly, ‘ _ Which _ worst?’

‘Mr Kuryakin, if you feel able to walk, we’ll go to a private room,’ Bainbridge suggested. Illya nodded, and Napoleon helped him up.

‘He’s committed to privacy, you know,’ Illya said in a confidential tone to Napoleon as they walked. Napoleon was struck by how ridiculous it was that having just run around Manhattan searching for him to find him sobbing over two loaves of bread, it was Illya reassuring him.

‘You want me to tell him the worst?’ Napoleon asked, and Illya nodded. So as soon as Bainbridge had closed the door of his large, cosy office, Napoleon said in an unnaturally stiff voice, ‘Mr Kuryakin has been a prisoner of the Soviet state labour camps for over two months. While he was there, in addition to the expected – er – privation, he was repeatedly gang raped.’

Illya startled him by giving a strangled laugh. Then he stepped carefully away from Napoleon and deposited himself full length on the psychiatrist’s black leather couch.

‘So, you see, Napoleon,’ he said, a slight tone of hysteria colouring his voice. ‘I’ll be well in no time.’

  


((O))

  


When Bainbridge told Napoleon to leave Illya with him he didn’t know whether to be reluctant or relieved. Illya’s eyes followed him as he moved to leave the room, and he wanted desperately to kiss him. In the end he settled for crossing to the couch and pulling his partner into a tight hug, squeezing so hard that in the end Illya gasped and actually laughed. Napoleon rubbed a hand fondly over his head, all the while with an uncomfortable feeling between his shoulder blades at being watched by a psychiatrist in what half the world thought was a perversion.

He wandered out into the halls of the main building, and unsurprisingly it wasn’t long before he was accosted by someone. Lynda Belson from Weapons came around the corner and grabbed hold of his arm, her eyes wide.

‘Napoleon Solo! It’s been two months since I’ve seen you here, and now Susie says you came in with Mr Kuryakin looking terrible, and all his hair shorn off. I told her she must be seeing things, because I know what Mr Kuryakin’s like about his hair, but she swore to me it was true.’

Napoleon regarded her with a steely gaze. He didn’t have the patience for this. ‘Miss Dearborn has been gossiping in the commissary, has she?’ he asked coldly.

She faltered at his expression. ‘Oh, no, I’m sure! She’s still on duty at the front desk. I just happened to come past and she happened to – ’

‘Miss Belson,’ Napoleon said in a low voice. ‘Do I need to remind you about U.N.C.L.E.’s policy on gossip?’

She gaped, and he relented a little and touched his hand to her arm.

‘Don’t pass this on,’ he said firmly. ‘Do you understand?’

‘Why – yes, sir,’ she said, her voice suddenly extra-professional.

Napoleon nodded, and carried on down the corridor. He took a quick detour to the front desk to give Miss Dearborn a severe dressing down which left her almost in tears, and then went straight to Waverly’s room. He entered the large room with mixed feelings. Stepping in here felt like coming home, but leaving Illya behind in Psych reminded him how wrong everything was.

‘Ah, Mr Solo, it’s good to see you back,’ Waverly said with a smile as the doors shut behind him. ‘No Mr Kuryakin, eh? A touch of travel fatigue?’

Napoleon smiled wanly and seated himself in one of the high-backed leather chairs without waiting to be asked. He felt enormously tired.

‘Er, not quite, sir,’ he said rather awkwardly. He had no idea how he was going to broach this subject with Waverly. ‘Illya isn’t exactly well.’

‘Well, I do hope he’ll get over whatever ails him soon, Mr Solo,’ Waverly huffed, shuffling some papers and then dumping them in an out tray. ‘It’s getting on for two and a half months of your services that I’ve lost to the IMF. I was looking forward to having you back on active missions. But never mind. Can I get you some coffee? You look rather fagged.’

‘Mr Waverly,’ Napoleon said, and the gravity in his voice made the old man look up immediately.

‘Well, well, well,’ he muttered. ‘It’s like that, is it?’

He walked slowly over to a cabinet in the wall, opened it up, and poured two servings of whiskey into two bulbous bottomed glasses. Putting one in front of Napoleon, he sat down at the table himself, and started to pack tobacco into his pipe.

‘Well, go on, man,’ he said impatiently, waving a hand vaguely in Napoleon’s direction.

Napoleon took a mouthful of whiskey. As he had expected, it was so mellow that it seemed to melt down his throat. Waverly only ever bought the best.

‘Sir, Illya’s in Psych,’ he said plainly. ‘I just brought him in now.’

Waverly’s eyes widened. He put down his just-lit pipe on the edge of an ashtray.

‘In Psych, you say? Mr Kuryakin? Really?’

‘I had to bring him in, sir,’ Napoleon said, feeling unaccountably guilty. ‘He couldn’t function.’

He wanted to talk and talk and talk about it, to tell Waverly how he had found Illya crying over bread, how he had tried to rake his skin off with his fingernails, how he had almost scurried under a desk at German customs, how he could be fine one moment then apparently away on another plane the next. But he couldn’t. There was a lump in his throat so hard that no words would come.

Waverly came to his feet and walked stiffly to Napoleon’s chair. To Solo’s astonishment the old man’s hand descended to pat his shoulder a few times, and he said awkwardly, ‘There, there, Mr Solo. I’m sure he’ll be all right. They’re fine men in our Psychiatry Department. Very fine men.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Napoleon said. The lump had finally shifted. ‘Thank you, sir.’

He discreetly pulled out his handkerchief and blew his nose. Waverly patted him on the shoulder one more time, then regained his seat. Napoleon took a large mouthful of the whiskey, and let it warm his stomach. He thought about the sausage that Illya had been cooking, and realised how hungry he was.  _ Probably shouldn’t drink too much of this stuff _ , he thought, but he took another mouthful.

‘Mr Solo, your mission  _ was _ successful, I assume?’ Waverly asked. ‘I’ve had it through radar that Dr – er – Permyakov returned a day ago, but I haven’t had official word from Mr Phelps.’

‘Ah, well, Mr Phelps might not be back yet,’ Solo explained. ‘We took different flights in small groups. I don’t know his exact schedule. But yes, it was successful. Permyakov was extracted successfully, thanks to Illya.’

‘And Mr Kuryakin is with Psychiatry,’ Waverly prompted.

‘Well, yes, he is.’ Napoleon stared down at the circular table, trying to work out how to word this. ‘He was – affected – by the imprisonment.’ He looked up again suddenly. ‘How much do you know about the mission, sir? You knew about Permyakov.’

‘Mr Phelps let me in on the bare bones – just the bare bones, you understand, Mr Solo. That Permyakov was in need of extraction from a Soviet forced labour camp, and that Mr Kuryakin was the man to do so. That is all.’

He sounded disgruntled, and Napoleon couldn’t blame him. It couldn’t be easy to let your agents go for such a sketchy assignment.

‘Well, Mr Kuryakin took the place of another man destined for the camps, sir,’ Napoleon explained.

Waverly sucked in breath. ‘Hmm. Unpleasant, Mr Solo. I’ve heard enough about those places to make my blood run quite cold.’

‘Yeah, well, Illya was – quite badly damaged by the whole ordeal,’ Napoleon said carefully. He didn’t know how much to reveal, what would be an invasion of Illya’s privacy. Psych were bound to confidentiality but it was almost certain that Illya would be pressured to let the details be known at least to Waverly before he could come back on duty. But that would be Illya’s revelation to make, not Napoleon’s.

Waverly harrumphed and picked up his pipe, which had gone out. He set about studiously relighting it before saying, ‘Well, as I said, Mr Solo, I know a little too much about those camps. Horrific. Yes, utterly horrific. Chills one quite to the marrow. It’s a blasted nuisance, though, isn’t it? How soon do you think Mr Kuryakin will be back on duty?’

Napoleon took another huge mouthful of his whiskey, and Waverly looked shocked.

‘I say, now. Steady on, Mr Solo,’ he remonstrated. ‘That stuff’s fifty years oak matured, you know. In the Highlands of Scotland, too. It’s not just any old swill. It must be savoured. It’s seen two world wars, which is more than you’ve done, by God.’

‘Oh, I’m savouring it, sir, I promise you,’ Napoleon said earnestly.

He swirled the liquor around in the glass and brought it to his nose, inhaling it appreciatively. Napoleon was no smoker, but the scent of Waverly’s pipe smoke blended perfectly with the whiskey to give the room the cosy feeling of a gentleman’s club.

‘Sir, I don’t know when Illya will be back on duty,’ he said after a long moment of just staring into his drink. ‘He’s **–** well – he’s all broken up, sir. He’ll need time to recover physically, too. We estimated he’s lost over thirty pounds in weight, and he wasn’t exactly packing spare pounds to start with.’

‘I might never have let Phelps have him if I’d known this would be the result,’ Waverly grumbled.

If it had been anyone else, Napoleon would have had the urge to punch his lights out, but he knew Waverly. Grumbling was just his way of expressing his concern. Emotions of affection were just not something one aired in public.

‘Well, all right, Mr Solo,’ the old man said eventually. ‘Thank you for reporting in. I’ll have you put down as on two weeks of leave from tomorrow. Will that be all right?’

Napoleon stared at him, uncertain what to say. He had expected to be pencilled in for duty straight away.

‘Er – thank you, sir,’ he said eventually. ‘I appreciate it. It was a tough assignment.’

‘Well,’ Waverly muttered, covering his feelings again in bluster. ‘No point in burning out one of my best agents. Just see that you look after Mr Kuryakin, won’t you? I want him back, too.’

  


((O))

  


The two private rooms for patients in the psych department were cosy, at least, but they were still hospital rooms. Illya moved restlessly about Room 2, touching the furnishings, twitching at the bedding. This place was going to be his home at least for the next few days, and he wanted so badly to be in his  _ own _ home; either in his or Napoleon’s apartment. Worse, Dr Bainbridge had insisted that he must submit to a physical examination later, and the idea of that made him feel sick. Bainbridge had told him he could have it under light sedation, but he hated that idea too. He didn’t want anyone ever touching him there again, and he didn’t want to be drugged out of his senses when he was.

He kicked lightly at the armchair in the corner, turned on the television, turned it off again, feeling like an animal in a zoo. He wasn’t exactly being held here against his will – the door wasn’t even locked – but Dr Bainbridge had been so firm about him staying that it felt like an order. He  _ hated _ hospitals, and this was just as much a hospital as any other. It was worse, because he was here because he was mad.

_ Not mad, traumatised _ , Bainbridge had said.  _ You are suffering from gross stress reaction, Mr Kuryakin, and you need time to recover _ .

Those words seemed so clinical, as in fact they were. Did ‘gross stress reaction’ explain why sometimes the room shrank away and left him in a void? Why sometimes his body didn’t seem like his own? Why he see-sawed and expanded and contracted until he felt like a floating balloon? Why colours faded into white and grey and nothing was real? Why when the memories came they weren’t memories at all, but reality?

The injection had been helping, but it was wearing off, and Bainbridge had told him that it must be the last. He would be started on a course of pills later. The dextraline was addictive if used over prolonged periods, and with that news instantly Illya felt revolted at it. He hated the idea of any kind of addiction. He needed to be able to rely on himself, not to be dependant on outside forces.

He paced the room a few more times, and then backed himself into the armchair and sat down, trying to control the obsessive urge to be moving. He found himself tapping his foot, and fought to stop himself. Then his fingers started to tap. When he clenched his fists and there was no rhythm to distract him his mind started to jerk like a needle on a scratched record, showing him flashing moments from the  _ zona _ , flashing seconds of physical assault. He couldn’t sit here like a mad person tapping out rhythms, rocking in the chair, but the memory was on him like an express train then, rushing over him, making his lungs freeze. He tried to wail, to call for help, but there was no air. He couldn’t breathe out without first breathing in, and the men were on him, and – oh – oh – 

The scent of perfume was the first thing that got through. Then the voice, a woman’s voice. There were no women’s voices in the  _ zona. _

‘Mr Kuryakin! Mr Kuryakin!’

There was a woman close against him. Her fabric covered breast pressing against his cheek. Her hand rubbing slowly up and down his back. He felt as if he were being strangled, and then she pressed something paper over his mouth and said, ‘Try to breathe, Mr Kuryakin. Try to fill the bag. Come on. You can do it.’

He concentrated on the crackle of the paper as he fought to make his lungs obey. In and out. In and out. How strange that all life boiled down to the in and out of breath, the in and out of blood from the heart. That reciprocal action was everything. In and out, like – like –

He mustn’t think of that. He tried to breathe.

‘That’s it,’ she said. ‘Another breath.’

And he watched the bag inflate in front of him like another pair of lungs, then suck hollow as he drew breath in.

‘That’s it,’ she said again.

He lifted his eyes from the sucking and inflating bag. Red-brown hair. Magenta framed glasses. Brown eyes. He had seen her before but he hadn’t known she was a psych nurse. He didn’t know her name.

‘Do you feel a little better now?’ she asked him with a smile. He made to lower the bag, but she stayed his hand. ‘No, keep on breathing into it for a while. Just concentrate on in and out.’

He tried to say, ‘But how can I answer you if I’m breathing into a bag?’ but it came out muffled and crackling.

She smiled. ‘It’s all right. Don’t worry about talking. Now, see here – ’

Mutely, Illya followed her arm with the bag still over his mouth, to see her pointing at a cord with a red pull on it.

‘This is the emergency cord,’ she told him. ‘You can pull it any time, if you feel like you need someone. You mustn’t hesitate to call someone. Day or night, we’re happy to come. And emergency doesn’t mean a heart attack or an open vein. It means if you’re panicking, or you’re afraid you’re going to hurt yourself, or just really need someone to be with you.’

Illya gazed at the cord, wishing he could have a similar one to summon Napoleon. He needed Napoleon, but he hadn’t felt able to ask for him. He wondered if he could have Napoleon at the physical exam, or if he even wanted him to witness that. He mustn’t think about the physical exam. His need for Napoleon surged.

‘Mr Solo will be in very soon,’ the nurse said, and Illya stared at her, the bag suddenly deflating as he drew in breath, wondering if he had spoken aloud. ‘He’s going to come have lunch with you,’ she continued, ‘but then I want you to have a sleep, since you’re just back from a transatlantic flight. You look exhausted, anyway. _ ’ _

Finally Illya lowered the bag. ‘I slept a lot on the plane, Miss – ’

‘Sandra Hudson,’ the nurse smiled, ‘but you can call me Sandy.’

‘I slept a lot on the plane,’ he repeated. ‘I’m really not – ’

He trailed off at the expression on her face, realising this was not an argument he was in any frame of mind to win.

‘Can I get you a cup of tea?’ she asked.

Illya relaxed a step further. He almost laughed. That took him right back to Cambridge. Tea, the cure-all.

‘Strong. Milk. No sugar,’ he said with a grateful smile.

She turned briefly at the door. ‘You’ll be all right? I won’t be more than five minutes, but you know where the cord is.’

Illya looked at the cord. ‘I know where it is,’ he nodded. ‘I’ll be all right.’

She smiled, and left. Illya followed her to the door and stood looking out into the corridor. The Psych section wasn’t exactly separate from the main infirmary, but it was set around a right angle at the end of the block, so it was both discreet and isolated from the physical medical challenges of the rest of the place. The walls were painted buttermilk yellow instead of plain white, and there was carpet. It was meant to be homely, and it was as homely as a medical institution could be. But it was not home.

He turned back into the room and sank into the armchair again. He wished there were books in the room. He would have to remember to ask Napoleon to bring books… He wondered how long he would be here, and then he started to wonder if he would ever be able to leave, and his chest started to tighten again. He glanced at the red emergency cord and just the knowledge that he  _ could  _ pull it helped a little.

He closed his eyes and concentrated on breathing in, slow and steady. In and out. In and out. And his feet remembered being wrapped in rags and clad in  _ valenki _ , and the cold still pushing through to make the joints in his toes and ankles ache. He remembered struggling to put one boot in front of another through foot deep snow, struggling to pull a saw through unwilling wood, pulling and pushing until his wrists and elbows and shoulders and neck and back all cried out with the effort and sweat was running into his clothes despite the cold. And not being allowed to stop. Being able to pause momentarily to readjust his grip, but always, always having to get back to work before he was punished. He remembered bread, black bread, crumbling in his fingertips, his stomach never, ever being full enough, that tight, aching feeling of always being too cold and too hungry and too tired, and knowing that each day would just be a cycle, identical to the last.

He opened his eyes, and the sight of the warm room was like a slap to the face. His feet were warm. His arms were hugged around himself, his fingers clenched tightly into the thin fabric of his sleeves so that the sore scrapes beneath burned. Nurse Hudson had put down two cups of tea on the nightstand and was sitting on the bed, saying something. His face was wet with tears. Nurse Hudson stroked his arm and smiled at him, and he smiled back through the tears.

‘If you want to talk,’ she said, ‘I’m here.’


	7. Chapter 7

His physical examination was going to be at four o’clock. Illya watched the clock at the side of the room, watched the second hand moving round, and the minute hand slowly clunking in its wake. He sat very still on the chair in his room, trying to steady his breathing and calm himself, but it wasn’t working, despite the sedative in his system. He could feel it coming on him like an express train; a roaring, whirling sense of panic. He could hear a strange knocking, and then he realised it was him, rocking on the chair. He dug his fingernails into his arm and scraped them along the skin, ploughing scabs from the surface and opening new gouges.

‘Oh god,’ he whispered to himself, ‘Oh god god god...’

They were going to strip him, to touch him. He tried to reach for the emergency cord but his arm wouldn’t unbend at the elbow. It was too far away. He could hear himself starting to wail. And then the door opened and he saw the white coat of a doctor, he remembered white snow falling, he remembered being pressed on the rough plank floor and his clothes being stripped from his lower half, and he was scurrying away so fast that he didn’t know where he was going.

‘Illya. Illya, listen to me.’

Napoleon. That was Napoleon. His heart was thundering so hard in his ears he couldn’t think, but that was Napoleon talking to him.

He forced his eyes to open. Napoleon was lying on his side on the floor, and that was when he realised he was too, pushed under the hospital bed, jammed against metal framework. Napoleon reached out and took his hand.

‘Illya, you need to come out,’ Napoleon said.

He couldn’t move. He was breathing in dust, but he couldn’t move. He opened his mouth, but he couldn’t speak.

‘Mr Solo, let me,’ came a voice. It was one of the medical doctors, not a psychiatrist. It was the doctor who was going to examine him. He was going to strip him, touch him…

Illya froze up, his breath jerking to stillness in his lungs.

‘No,’ Napoleon said firmly. ‘It’s you he’s afraid of. Get Dr Bainbridge.’

‘Dr Bainbridge is taking a very important call. Now, this examination was scheduled for four o’clock, and I need to get it done.’

‘ _ Get Dr Bainbridge _ ,’ Napoleon grated, and footsteps suddenly left the room. ‘Illya,’ Napoleon said then. ‘Illya, it really would be easier if you weren’t under the bed.’

Illya’s hands were clenched into claws against his chest, one of them tight around Napoleon’s hand. He couldn’t breathe and he couldn’t move, but Napoleon was pulling him out across the carpet until the light of the room flooded his face, and then he was being lifted onto the bed.

‘It’s not going to work,’ Napoleon said over him. ‘You can’t examine him like this. You just can’t.’

And then Dr Bainbridge was bending over him, speaking to him calmly and quietly, and he gleaned little pieces.  _ Don’t need to leave the room... Sedative... Be all right... _

His head was spinning. He felt a needle slip into his arm, and then slowly everything began to soften and ease. Someone was talking, saying his name, explaining something. He couldn’t concentrate. He tried to speak, and his voice worked, slurringly.

‘’Poleon. ’fraid, ’Poleon...’

Hands were in his, very strong and warm and soft. He felt someone touch the waist of his trousers, and he cried out loosely, unable to muster the sharp noise he had intended.

‘Well, what’s the difference?’ someone said. ‘It’s not like he’s a vestal virgin. Bit late to develop shyness.’

There was a whirl of angry voices, Napoleon and someone else, maybe Bainbridge, and for a moment he was all alone, and he tried to think how to get out of here, but he knew he couldn’t move. He tried to move his legs and he knew he couldn’t walk. Napoleon was shouting and someone else was trying to calm him down. But then he was being undressed, his trousers being undone and pulled down just as they had done to him in the  _ zona _ , and he couldn’t do anything about it. He felt so scared. He was so scared. He tried to lash out but he couldn’t, couldn’t fight, could hardly move.

Then a prick in his arm again, and everything blurred further. He was lying on his side with his face in Napoleon’s chest, smelling the scent of Napoleon against him. He could feel the hands touching him, but everything was so far away, it almost wasn’t real. There was such warmth here, but he was still afraid, deep inside. Voices speaking, hands touching him, and, oh, they touched him there between the legs, and he couldn’t move and couldn’t speak, but he felt as if he were going to die. He moaned silently against Napoleon’s chest, not knowing if the moans were ever leaving his mind and coming into reality. He didn’t want them to do this. He didn’t want to be touched. He was supposed to be safe here...

  


((O))

  


It took a few minutes for Napoleon to realise that he was shaking. Dr Bainbridge was white faced too, his lips thin lines. For two cents Napoleon would have grabbed the medical doctor in an arm lock and thrown him out of a third floor window. All he could do was hold Illya semi-conscious against him as Bainbridge helped Dr Sinclair to perform his exam. Illya was murmuring and making tiny sounds of distress that made his throat swell, and Napoleon had to look away as the doctor pulled on gloves and slicked lubricant over his finger. Illya cried out incoherently as he was touched, and Napoleon held him all the tighter.

When they were finished, Napoleon was still white with fury.

‘I will be lodging an official complaint against your treatment of my partner, doctor,’ he said bitterly. ‘He has been through enough. Both your comments and your physical actions were well out of line.’

He glanced at Bainbridge, and the psychiatrist nodded. ‘I will substantiate that complaint,’ he said. ‘Mr Kuryakin is in a very delicate state and on seeing his reaction that exam would have been far better done under a general anaesthetic.’

‘I refuse to give a general anaesthetic to a patient who doesn’t need it, especially a patient in Mr Kuryakin’s weak physical condition,’ the doctor said. ‘In my judgement, heavy sedation was the best option.’ He stripped his gloves off and tossed them in the bin. ‘I’ll make my report and send it down to you, Dr Bainbridge.’

After he left, Bainbridge put a hand on Napoleon’s arm. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

Napoleon wanted to ask him furiously why he had allowed Sinclair to go ahead, but he knew that Bainbridge was outranked by him and had been left with little choice. Instead of shouting, he shrugged.

‘I’ll be filing that complaint,’ he said. ‘But let’s get him dressed.’

Illya was half naked on the bed under a sheet, his eyes half closed, obviously barely conscious, but his hand was still curled around Napoleon’s, and Napoleon was stroking his shorn hair without realising he was doing it.

‘I brought some pyjamas,’ a nurse said, holding them out rather hesitantly. ‘You can bring in some things for him when you have the chance.’

‘Yeah, I will,’ Napoleon muttered. ‘Thanks. I can dress him. I don’t need help.’

He figured Illya had been on display for the medical personnel quite enough today, so he waited until they were gone, then carefully wiped Illya down and dressed him.

  


((O))

  


Illya drifted, he drifted even further away, and then he was waking tight against Napoleon with the crispness of cotton pyjamas on his body, with an uncomfortable feeling between his legs and the dry, hot sensation in his eyes of having cried himself to sleep.

‘I’m sorry,’ Napoleon whispered, stroking his cheek. ‘I’m sorry, Illya. I didn’t want them to do that but they said they had to, to make sure you were safe. To make sure you weren’t too – damaged. I’m so sorry.’

Illya blinked dazedly, trying to work out the meaning of the half darkened room, trying to see the clock on the wall. Napoleon was pressed alongside him, somehow fitting into the single bed with him.

‘It’s almost ten,’ Napoleon said. ‘Well past visiting hours, but I got a special dispensation.’

‘Feel so strange,’ Illya said. ‘Fuzzy. Sick.’

‘That was a strong sedative they gave you.’

‘Not strong enough,’ Illya murmured. His throat felt hoarse.

‘No. But it’s done now. They know what your injuries are. Deep tissue bruising and abrasions, but the tears are healing on their own and you don’t need surgery. You’ll be all right. No more physical exams, Illya. They’re done.’

Illya swallowed hard. He couldn’t see that Napoleon could promise that. If they decided he needed it, they would do it.

‘You been here all this time?’ he asked blearily.

‘Yeah, all this time,’ Napoleon replied, sounding as if he would do it again in a heartbeat.

‘I want to go home now,’ Illya said, struggling to sit up, and Napoleon sat up too and swung his legs over the edge of the bed.

‘You need to stay here a while longer, Illya,’ Napoleon said seriously. ‘You agreed to that. You need to stay in.’

He regarded Napoleon through eyes that wouldn’t quite focus. ‘Then I’m a prisoner here?’

‘You’re a  _ patient _ ,’ Napoleon corrected him, with an edge in his voice. ‘Illya, I’m sorry about the physical exam but you  _ do _ need to stay here. You need the help that Dr Bainbridge can give you.’

Illya fought against the whirling feelings. Dr Bainbridge had betrayed him. He felt that. Dr Bainbridge should have stopped the other doctor from touching him. But then he knew, he did know, that the physical examination had been necessary. He knew that sometimes the doctors here just had to do their jobs, over their patients’ objections. But how he wanted to go home, to just  _ be _ home…

‘I just need some time,’ he tried.

‘Illya,’ Napoleon said firmly. ‘Trust me. Coming from someone who had to drag you, practically catatonic, from under this bed, you need more than time. You need to stay here. You need to  _ choose _ to stay here and let Dr Bainbridge help you. Please. Will you do that?’

‘Can you stay?’ Illya asked. He hated the needy tone in his voice, but he was so fearful of being abandoned in an institution again, even a benevolent one like the U.N.C.L.E. infirmary.

‘I don’t know,’ Napoleon said honestly. ‘I might be able to wheedle them into letting me stay overnight tonight. But not after that. You know they won’t let me do that. At worst I can stay in one of the agents’ rooms here, and I won’t be more than a few minutes away.’

The monumental aloneness of his own person crashed over him. No matter what anyone did, he was alone in his own body, alone in his mind. It terrified him. He was mad, he was, and he was terrified of being left alone with his treacherous thoughts.

‘Please, Napoleon,’ he heard himself say. ‘Please...’

What would it hurt for Napoleon to be here? What trouble would one more body in the room make? He couldn’t be alone. He was so scared, terrified of himself, of his mind.

‘I will stay here tonight,’ Napoleon promised. ‘Illya, love, I will stay here tonight. All right?’

Illya nodded slowly. He had to get control of himself, to wrestle control of that awful, wheedling, needy part of himself. He hated to be like this.

‘Would you like me to get you something to eat?’ Napoleon asked, and Illya’s hands immediately clenched on Napoleon’s, a reflex action faster than his mind. ‘All right, all right,’ Napoleon said. ‘Listen, I’m going to go to the door and ask someone to bring you some food from the commissary. You haven’t eaten since lunch.’

Illya fought against every instinct in his body to follow Napoleon to the door. He clenched onto the mattress and struggled to bring himself back to some level of sanity. He heard Napoleon talking quietly to someone, and then he came back to the bed.

‘She’s going to fetch you something,’ Napoleon said, sitting down in the visitor’s chair. Illya wished he would slip back into the bed, but he said nothing.

‘Thank you, Napoleon,’ he said. He stared at the opposite wall for a few moments, then said, ‘I’m sorry. I – I hate to be like this.’

Napoleon lifted his clenched hand and kissed his knuckles. ‘I know, Illya. I know. This isn’t you. It’s what they did to you. Just like when you’ve been injured physically and you need to recover. You just need to recover.’

‘Napoleon, I think I’ve been worse since you brought me here,’ Illya worried. ‘Wouldn’t it be better if I went home?’

Napoleon ruffled a hand over his shorn head. ‘Illya, honey, you’re just able to let it go now. You didn’t break down entirely until we got you out of that place. This is the same. Dr Bainbridge explained it to me. You’re safe here, so you can let yourself go, not build it up any more. But you  _ do _ need to be here. Please, trust me on this. You do trust me, don’t you?’

He did. He did trust Napoleon. But he was so scared about so many things, about being here, about losing his sanity, about never being well again. But he nodded, trying to keep his mind on a vaguely normal level. ‘Have you seen Mr Waverly?’ he asked.

‘He sends his best,’ Napoleon said. ‘I explained everything – I mean, as much as he needs to know. Everything’s all right at that end.’

‘And the others? Have you had contact?’

‘Jim’s not back yet, but he should be tomorrow. The others are back, and fine. Permyakov’s safe. Lagoshin and his partner are safe. Everyone’s just fine.’

‘So – Permyakov’s not – loopy,’ Illya said with a twisted smile.

‘Permyakov wasn’t gang raped every night,’ Napoleon said in a hard voice. ‘Illya, you suffered  _ dreadfully _ , and you’ve come back injured. It’s not a competition. You haven’t failed in any way.’

‘And I suppose everyone knows?’ Illya asked.

‘Knows?’

‘About what happened to me. And about us...’

Napoleon shook his head. ‘Dr Bainbridge and a handful of medical staff are the only ones who know about the rapes. Dr Bainbridge is the only one who knows the full context. And about us – well...’ He shook his head. ‘I don’t know, Illya. Dr Bainbridge knows. Some of the medical staff know – they must do, they must have seen me with you. But I don’t care, Illya. Let them know.’

Illya’s heart clenched. How could it be that easy? How could Napoleon think it was that easy? After he had been imprisoned and ostracised and raped night after night because of that kind of love, how could it ever be that easy?

‘Illya, this isn’t the Soviet Union,’ Napoleon told him softly. ‘I’m not naive enough to think that people will just turn a blind eye to it here. I’m not naive enough to think it’s anything we can flaunt in public. But you’re not going to be sent to a gulag for loving me.’

Tears were squeezing from Illya’s eyes, and he brushed them away angrily. He felt as if he were spinning in circles, and there was no safe place to stop.

‘Dr Bainbridge will  _ help _ you,’ Napoleon promised. ‘He’ll help both of us. He understands what it means to both of us. He understands and supports us both. Okay? I know it seems pretty impossible right now, but it will be all right in the end. I promised I’d help you untangle yourself when you got out of this, and here I am. It will be all right.’

He reached under his collar and drew out a thin gold chain, which he carefully put around Illya’s neck and tucked beneath his pyjama top.

‘There. I promised I’d look after this,’ he said. Then he took the narrow gold band off his finger and slipped it on to Illya’s. ‘And this.’

The ring was loose on Illya’s thin finger, and it slipped off onto the blankets.

‘Ah, well, maybe I can take care of this for a while longer,’ Napoleon said, lifting Illya’s hand and kissing it. ‘Do you mind? It makes me feel like I’m with you even when I’m not.’

Illya smiled, and actually felt a real warmth in his chest. The chain and medallion around his neck were warm from Napoleon’s body heat, and he liked to think of the ring on Napoleon’s finger.

‘Take care of it,’ he said, closing his hand over Napoleon’s, over the ring.

‘Just like I’ll take care of you,’ Napoleon promised.

  


((O))

  


The first night passed in nightmares and insomnia and panic attacks, and Napoleon was exhausted when morning came. He wasn’t sure how he had managed to sleep at all, crushed in with Illya in the narrow bed. But he had dozed, sometimes when Illya slept and sometimes as he lay awake beside him. There was an on duty nurse who came at the worst of the panic attacks, at least, so Napoleon was relieved of some of that stress. But he felt a huge guilt at the relief he felt when Bainbridge called Illya in to his office for counselling, and Napoleon felt at liberty to go into one of HQ’s agents’ rooms and grab two hours of undisturbed sleep. After that the whole situation seemed more positive, and when he came back to the infirmary Illya seemed a little better too. Napoleon started to believe that perhaps Illya really could be healed of this terrible burden, even if it would take a long time.

When he got back to Illya’s room the Russian was engaged in writing a meticulous list of things he thought he would need, having agreed to stay in the infirmary for at least a week. That was a huge relief to Napoleon as well. He knew Illya needed special attention for physical medical issues as well as mental. His diet needed to be monitored in these early days, his medication needed to be carefully prescribed, and the doctor wanted to be able to check his vitals and bowel movements too. But the biggest relief was that for now Illya would have the safety net of the whole U.N.C.L.E. Psych Department around him, because Illya’s panic and self harm and dissociation were terrifying to Napoleon. He just didn’t know how to deal with it. The sight of Illya rocking in the shower and tearing strips from his arms haunted him still.

‘So you want me to bring all of these books?’ Napoleon checked, scanning the list. ‘Illya, will you have time to read all of these books?’

‘I don’t know,’ Illya said rather vaguely. He was sitting cross legged on the bed and rocking gently. ‘I missed reading. I just want some of my books.’

‘Okay,’ Napoleon said.

It didn’t escape his notice that all of the books were in Russian. He had thought that Illya might want to distance himself from everything Soviet for a while, but he supposed regardless of what his country had done to him, Illya was Russian and this was one of his native tongues. Perhaps it would be easier right now for his stressed mind to latch onto a first language than a second or third one.

‘Okay, I’ll get those books,’ he said. ‘And I’ll pick up the latest American Journal of Physics for you. And I’ll stop by the grocery store and get you that tea. Then I’ll try to persuade the nurses to actually use it when they make you a drink.’

‘Thank you,’ Illya said, looking up, looking enormously grateful.

‘You know, you should have a nap,’ Napoleon said. ‘You look tired.’

‘Do I?’ he asked vaguely.

‘ _ Yes _ ,’ Napoleon said. ‘Illya?’ He put a hand on Illya’s cheek, and Illya looked at him with a faint smile. ‘Listen to your body. You had a very long night, and you’ve had counselling. You’re tired.’

‘Are you going?’ Illya asked.

‘Well, if you want me to get those things...’

A moment of fear seemed to flash through Illya’s eyes, then he looked angry at himself, then he bit his lip into his mouth and flexed his fingers as if he wanted to scratch at himself.

‘I’ll wait until you’re asleep,’ Napoleon promised. ‘Then I’ll go get those things.’

Illya closed his eyes, opened them again, and took a deep breath. Then he said, ‘No, go now, Napoleon. I’ll be all right. This is a safe place. I’ll be all right.’

Napoleon looked at him hard, trying to read what might be going on behind those blue eyes.

‘Are you sure, Illya?’ he asked.

Illya gave a strange little laugh. ‘I was without you for two months in the  _ zona _ , Napoleon. I’ll be all right.’

Napoleon looked at him a little longer, then put his hand on Illya’s cheek again, meeting his eyes.

‘If you’re sure,’ he said. ‘I’ll be as quick as I can be. You go to sleep, and I’ll try to be back before you wake up.’

  


((O))

  


He lay on his bed after Napoleon had left, on top of the blankets because it was so warm in here, so warm compared to the  _ zona. _ Everything was so different here. It was hard to believe that he had been there a week ago, and now he was here. How could he have been that broken, emaciated man in ragged clothes working like a horse every day, shouted at, spat on, hated and abused by prisoners and guards alike? By everyone… Everyone except – He remembered Vanya, and his heart gave a jolt. Vanya, still there, alone, without a protector. Would they have moved on to Vanya? Would they be raping him again? How long would he survive?

Tears ran down his cheeks. Was he crying? He put a hand to his chest and tried to work out if there were the right emotions in there for crying. Poor Vanya. Poor, poor Vanya…

Had Vanya been real? Had any of it been real? He closed his eyes and the bed rocked beneath him, and the memory was so strong around him. The sawdust filled mattress under his back. The stale urine stench of his clothes. The lice itching in every seam. The cold, cold, always cold, pressing into his toes, his fingers, his ears and nose. Cold to the very heart. Could it really be so cold anywhere on earth? He saw the pine trees, their branches weighed down almost to the ground with snow. The land stretching away on the walk to the forest, snow everywhere, dark smudges where there was a town or a factory. The dark, dirty smudge of the  _ zona _ there on the horizon as they walked home. Oh god, oh god – 

He opened his eyes and heaved in breath as if he were surfacing from underwater. He saw the buttermilk coloured walls, the door with the little window in it, a relaxing print on the opposite wall that wasn’t glassed in. No glass because this was a Psych room. No glass because he couldn’t be trusted. And he couldn’t be. He knew that. He drifted between reality and memory. When the feelings were too strong he wanted to tear into his flesh to make them go away. If there were glass over that print he might have used it.

_ Napoleon _ . He thought of Napoleon. He had only gone to get some things. He would be back soon. He was expecting Illya to go to sleep. He wasn’t expecting to come back to an emotional ruin. He needed to keep control of himself, to not fade out into that white, empty place or back to the  _ zona _ or into the sensation of lying under a grunting, thrusting man. He couldn’t hurt himself. He couldn’t break down.

He looked toward the emergency cord. It was there if he needed it. He didn’t need to be bleeding or in pain. He could pull it if he needed someone to bring him back from the hell of his mind. Just looking at it helped. He lay there with his eyes on it, just looking at it, not quite trusting himself to let his eyes close. But Napoleon was right. He was tired. He was sleepy. The day felt so long and there was so much more of it to come. He stared at the emergency cord and his eyes became so hot, and it hurt to keep them open, and then he was drifting asleep, and then –

He came awake with a gasping sob, staring around, expecting to see rough wooden bunks and wooden walls and that ineffectual stove. He had felt someone’s hand on him, someone’s hand on his behind, just touching him there. He looked wildly around the little room but there was no one there. No one at all. No one could have been touching him. But his heart was racing, his blood pounding in his head. His chest felt so tight, as if someone were on him, pressing down on him, stopping him breathing, stopping his heart from being able to beat. He tried to catch his breath. He was dizzy, and he reached out with stiff fingers and pulled the emergency cord, and a moment later there was a nurse in the room saying, ‘What is it, Mr Kuryakin? Are you feeling bad?’

He couldn’t talk. He couldn’t breathe. He felt as though he could hardly see. He had let Napoleon down. He had let everyone down by letting himself be taken over by this. The world seemed to swim in and out. He felt so far away from everything, from the bed, from his body. The nurse was touching him, but his mind was within a shell within a shell within a shell within a shell. It was all so far away, and he was drifting, drifting…

‘There, it’s all right. It’s all right.’

He had felt something in his arm. Someone had injected something into his arm. He took a shaking breath. He felt as if he could breathe again. Air was coming into his lungs. His heart was still racing, but it was calmer. Everything was calming down. He clenched his hands and unclenched them again. His fingers seemed to be part of his body again. They were part of him. He looked down at his hands, at his knuckles, then up at the nurse who was with him.

‘Mr Kuryakin,’ she said, and he gave a smile which he thought must look like a kind of grimace.

‘I’m so sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m so sorry...’

‘No, it’s all right,’ she told him. ‘Don’t worry. It’s all right. Just try to breathe slowly and calmly.’

‘It was a dream,’ he said. Had it been as much as a dream; that single feeling of a touch on his buttock? Had it been enough to excuse this? But he felt compelled to explain. ‘Stupid...’

‘No, it’s all right,’ she said again. ‘We all have bad dreams. You’re just not in a great place to handle them right now. I’ll sit with you for a while if you like. Yes?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, please.’

‘Would you like some music, Mr Kuryakin?’ she asked.

‘Oh,’ he said, thinking. How long had it been since he had listened to music? He suddenly felt thirsty, starving for music. ‘Yes, please,’ he said.

‘Well, I’ll fetch a radio,’ she told him. ‘Perhaps you’ll be able to sleep then.’

‘Thank you,’ he said. He watched her move to the door and go out. She was gone for a minute, then she was back, plugging a radio in and tuning it, asking, ‘What would you like?’

The radio screeched through static, through pop, static again, voices, static, and then classical music came suddenly clear, and then started to waver.

‘That,’ he said quickly. ‘I want that, please. Thank you.’

So she turned the dial back until the music was sharp again, and he lay back on his pillow and closed his eyes and listened. It was Bach. He couldn’t remember what the piece was, but he knew it was Bach. It was like lying in the clear waters of a flowing river. There was a beautiful order there in music, and his disordered mind latched on to that certainty, and it soothed him. Perhaps he would be able to sleep like this. Perhaps the music would keep him safe.

  


((O))

  


Napoleon sat and watched Illya sleep. He let his eyes drift over the sharp angles of his face; the hollows of his cheeks, the stark cheekbones above them, the dark shadows around his eyes. Perhaps Illya had looked something like this as a gangly teenager, if he had ever gone through that phase of growing faster than his calorie intake could keep up with.

He remembered with a horrible little jolt that Illya had spent some of his most formative years living through the occupation of Kiev. Of course he must had looked half-starved then. He probably was. No wonder he hadn’t grown tall.

He wanted to reach out a hand to stroke his palm over the short, shorn hair of Illya’s head. He hated the look of that shaven hair, but he loved the way it felt on his palm. He hated what it meant. He hated to think of Illya being compelled to strip to nudity and stand there while hostile guards shaved him. He couldn’t bear to think of how degraded he must have felt through the entire experience.

It was inevitable, really, that Illya had ended up in such a state. No wonder his mind was so tangled up inside him. No wonder the panic and fear came over him in tsunamis. It was so hard to see, so hard to bear. It was so hard to bite back the instinctive words that came whenever someone speculated in HQ about what was wrong with U.N.C.L.E.’s star agent. He had heard the murmurings from those who had gleaned that Illya was confined to the Psych department; the little sentences that revealed people’s prejudice about Illya’s background, his stature, his psychological make-up. No one knew exactly what had happened to him so there were as many rumours as there were people willing to spread gossip. There were so many people who were just concerned for him, but every time he heard a critical remark Napoleon had to hold himself back from decking the speaker.

The music on the radio faded and human voices took its place. Illya stirred and muttered, and Napoleon took the opportunity to reach out and stroke his hair very lightly, murmuring reassurances. The talking turned to music again, and Illya exhaled and settled.

The door to Illya’s room opened very quietly and a nurse looked in.

‘Still asleep?’ she asked softly.

Napoleon smiled. ‘Still,’ he said. He had come back with everything on Illya’s list to find him fast asleep with the nurse sitting next to his bed, and the radio playing soft classical music. He had sat there for an hour already.

‘Any dreams?’ she asked.

Napoleon glanced at Illya then got up very quietly and moved over to the door.

‘Let’s take this into the corridor,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to wake him. I think he’s been dreaming a bit,’ he said as they moved outside and he shut the door. ‘He’s stirred a few times, a bit of muttering. But he hasn’t seemed too bad.’

‘He’s tired out,’ she said. ‘I know he had a bad night, and yesterday was very stressful for him. But I think we should wake him up in about half an hour. He needs to adjust to this time zone. If he sleeps too long now he’ll find it hard later.’

‘I suppose so,’ Napoleon said. After Illya had spent so long labouring with so little food and rest, in such terrible conditions, it seemed cruel to deny him sleep when he seemed to need it. But he knew the nurse was right.

‘We’ll give him something tonight to help him sleep better,’ the nurse promised, touching Napoleon’s arm with her hand and giving him a smile that would have made his stomach turn over, in the days before his relationship with Illya. Now he just saw it as kind and sympathetic, and he smiled in return.

‘I think the counselling took it out of him,’ he said.

‘Yes, it will. Emotional distress is physically exhausting. But Dr Bainbridge has been very positive about the session. He’s going to spend as much time as he can helping Mr Kuryakin through this.’

‘And he’ll be all right?’ Napoleon asked anxiously. This wasn’t like a bullet wound or a broken leg. It was so hard to tell what might happen with someone’s mind.

The nurse smiled. ‘He should be,’ she said. ‘We can never make promises, but you know yourself how mule-headed Mr Kuryakin can be. He never succumbs to anything easily. He fights hard. He’s got a lot of people on his side.’

‘You think a week will do it?’ Napoleon asked doubtfully, glancing in through the little glass window in the door. Illya was still fast asleep.

‘No,’ the nurse said honestly. ‘No, a week won’t do it at all. But we hope he’ll be well enough to go home after a week or so. He only needs to be here if there’s any concern for his safety. A week should sort out whether that’s still true or not. We know he’ll be looked after by you when he goes home, and he’ll continue to have counselling and be on medication for a while.’

The counselling and the medication seemed like such small things compared to having Illya home. It was so hard to bear him being confined in this place when what he most seemed to need was love and reassurance. Napoleon could be here in the infirmary as much as he could, but he couldn’t give Illya the constant love and reassurance that he felt he needed to give, not with the honesty that needed to go along with it. He needed to have Illya alongside him in a place where he didn’t have to pretend they were just friends in front of most people they saw, where he could treat him as the life partner that he was. He needed to be able to hold him at night, to cook for him, to give him words of love and listen to his replies.

‘I’d better get back in to him,’ he said, glancing through the little window again. ‘I think he’s waking up.’

‘I’ll bring him a cup of tea,’ the nurse said with a smile. ‘And yes, I’ll use the tea you brought, Mr Solo. Would you like coffee?’

He smiled. ‘I would,’ he said, ‘most definitely like coffee.’

  


((O))

  


‘Now, Illya, I’m quite willing to let you go home on two conditions,’ Dr Bainbridge said. ‘You want to go home, don’t you?’

The word  _yes_ was on Illya’s lips, but then so was  _no._ It was safe here, everything was controlled here. In some ways it was like the  _zona_ . At least, it was in that there were almost no personal decisions, in that his life was controlled by other hands. He had been here for a week, and he was starting to feel something like the man he had used to be. The idea of leaving this healing sanctuary was so hard. But oh, he wanted to be able to just lie in his own bed – his or Napoleon’s, it didn’t matter which. He wanted to go to sleep with Napoleon and wake up with Napoleon. He hated to be alone. But he was scared, scared of the dissociation and panic attacks that came over him, scared of the terrible thoughts in his head. The depression was slowly being lifted now he was out of the  _zona_ and on a regular course of antidepressants, but it still weighed over everything and made the other things so hard to fight.

‘Yes,’ he said eventually. ‘Yes, I do want to go home.’

‘All right. Then these are my conditions. Firstly, that you don’t go home alone. I want someone to be with you always, especially in these early days. Are you happy for Mr Solo to fill that role?’

The miserable uncertainty flooded him. He was vile, degraded, ruined. Why would Napoleon want him?

‘All right, Illya,’ Dr Bainbridge said kindly. ‘I’ll tell you now, Mr Solo has already confirmed that he’ll look after you. Does that help?’

Illya looked up, startled. Napoleon would really do that?

‘He’ll need to work,’ he faltered.

‘He’s on leave for another week, and after that Mr Waverly will allow him to work around you. You’ll be coming in for regular therapy sessions and he can pick up work at those times. And that is my second condition – that you keep up your treatment. I will expect to see you every day at first, and we’ll review that as time goes on. And you will take your medication. No, I’m well aware of your reputation, Illya,’ Bainbridge continued as he opened his mouth. ‘I don’t want you hiding pills and saying you’ve taken them. I’ll expect Mr Solo to make sure you take everything as prescribed. It’s very necessary. Do you understand?’

Illya sighed. ‘Yes, I understand,’ he said.

‘All right. Well, Mr Solo can be round to pick you up after lunch.’

‘T-today?’ Illya faltered. Suddenly he wanted his small room here with its yellow walls and soft bed and the emergency cord on the wall. _Especially_ the emergency cord on the wall.

‘Yes, today. You’ll be all right, Illya. I have faith in you.’

The world was fluctuating around him, everything withdrawing, growing very small, very far away. He felt as if he were falling. And then he became aware of hands gripping his, fingers massaging his palms.

‘Illya. Illya, you’ll be all right,’ Bainbridge promised. ‘I wouldn’t let you go otherwise. You’ll be fine.’

He gasped in air, staring at the carpet as it rocked beneath him. The fingers on his palms were firm and insistent.

‘We’ve got plenty of time,’ Bainbridge reassured him. ‘For now, why don’t we just talk? Why are you worried about going home?’

Illya stared at his hands, at Bainbridge’s hands on his, and tried to ground himself.

‘If I – if this happens when I’m at home – ’ he began.

‘It will,’ Bainbridge told him plainly. ‘It might happen a little more at first, because you’re outside of what you feel is a safe environment. But we’re working on that, aren’t we, and I’ve spoken to Napoleon and he knows exactly how to help you if you have an episode.’

‘He – shouldn’t have to – ’ Illya began.

‘ _Yes_ , he should. He loves you, Illya. No, we’re quite clear on this,’ Bainbridge said as Illya flinched. ‘Whatever your current insecurities are telling you and whatever society tells us, he loves you, and I’d be hesitant to release you to someone who was just a friend, no matter how good a friend. You need that support, and you need to understand that you’re no imposition on him. He wants you to get better, and he will do all he can towards that, but he has no reservations about taking care of you in your sickness.’

  


((O))

  


When Napoleon came in later Illya was so glad to see him that he hugged him before he even spoke. He stood there with his head against Napoleon’s shoulder, and Napoleon’s arms folded around his body and held him hard.

‘Hey,’ Napoleon said gently after a while. ‘What’s this in aid of? Bainbridge told me you could come home. Has that changed?’

‘No,’ Illya said, then more firmly, ‘No. I’m just glad to see you.’

‘Do you feel ready to see Mr Waverly on the way out? He’s keen to see you.’

‘Oh,’ Illya said. That felt a little like having to see the headmaster.

Napoleon’s hands stroked his back. ‘Never mind, Illya. We’ll just go home. He won’t mind.’

‘If we could,’ Illya said. He was desperately afraid of breaking down in front of Waverly. Once he saw the state he was in he might throw him out of the organisation for good.

‘Yeah, we’ll go home, I’ll get take out for dinner, we can just take it very easy.’

‘And bed,’ Illya said.

Napoleon smiled. ‘And bed. I’ll even let you eat pizza on my Egyptian cotton sheets.’

At that, Illya laughed. ‘Now I  _know_ you love me.’

‘Of course I love you, idiot,’ Napoleon said, and rubbed his hand over Illya’s short fuzz of hair. ‘Now, do you need to pack, or – ’

Illya dropped his arms from Napoleon and gestured at the small case on the bed. ‘All done. It’s mostly books,’ he said as Napoleon went over to the bed and picked up the deceptively heavy case.

‘Yeah, I can tell,’ Napoleon said with a grimace, putting the case down again.

‘It’s your fault. You brought me most of them,’ Illya reminded him.

‘Hmm, well in that case it’s only fair I carry it. Oh, and I have all your medications here, Illya,’ Napoleon told him. ‘I stopped by to see Dr Bainbridge first and he’s gone through everything. But first things first. It’s cold out there today, and you don’t have a coat.’

‘Oh,’ Illya said in consternation. He had forgotten that. He had come in here in no more than slacks and a poloneck, and hadn’t been outside since. There weren’t even windows in the infirmary.

‘But that’s okay,’ Napoleon continued, ‘because I bought you a gift.’

Surprise jumped in Illya’s chest. Even though Napoleon had been bringing a gift every day, mostly books, it surprised him every time. He was waiting for Napoleon to realise his mistake and never come back, even though he knew that would never happen.

‘Here,’ Napoleon said, turning to pick up a large flat box that Illya hadn’t seen him bring in. ‘No, go on,’ he said, as Illya hesitated. ‘It’s all yours.’

So Illya reached out and lifted the lid from the box, and saw soft, dark fabric in there. He picked out a very simple, almost Russian style, hat lined with rabbit fur so soft that he couldn’t stop touching it.

‘It, er, goes on your head,’ Napoleon said with a smile, taking it out of Illya’s hands and setting it on his head. ‘There. That should protect you from the New York winter.’

Illya’s hand reached up to touch the hat for a moment, then he looked in the box again. ‘More,’ he said in wonderment, realising there was something under the folded layer of tissue paper on which the hat had lain.

‘Of course,’ Napoleon grinned, lifting the coat out of the box for him. It was knee-length, a very dark blue to match the hat. ‘Can’t have a hat without a coat. It – er – might be a bit big at first,’ he said as he helped it on to Illya’s thin frame, ‘but I’m looking forward to feeding you up.’

Illya stroked his hands down the soft cloth of the coat, and smiled. ‘You didn’t have to – ’ he began.

‘I _wanted_ to. Here, here’s your gloves,’ he said, handing Illya his old pair of leather gloves. Illya pushed them into a pocket.

‘You are too good to me, Napoleon,’ he said.

Napoleon kissed him on the forehead. ‘You deserve some good,’ he said. ‘Now, are you ready to go?’

‘Desperately,’ he said with great sincerity. Suddenly all he wanted was to be back at home.

‘Well, then,’ Napoleon said, taking his arm. ‘Shall we?’


	8. Chapter 8

The corridors outside of the Psych department seemed very bright, and full of people that Illya had no desire to speak to. Seeing people that he had known before all of this felt so jarring. He felt exposed in an excruciating kind of nakedness. He walked with his head tilted down and let Napoleon lead him through all the way to the front desk, where they handed in their badges. And then they were outside, looking up the steps from Del Floria’s, where snow was gently drifting down. Illya had always felt a sense of wonderment at New York in the snow, but he had seen so much snow recently, and as he turned his eyes to the sky the memory of standing in the yard in the  _ zona  _ slammed over him so hard that his breath caught in his lungs. A passer-by looked at him, straight at him with pale eyes, and the horror increased.

‘I can’t, Napoleon,’ he said in a choked voice. ‘Oh, Napoleon, I can’t...’

Napoleon took his arms in his hands. ‘Illya,’ he said gently. ‘You can, I promise you.’

Everything was diminishing, disappearing. It was hard to catch his breath. The world was whiting out at the edges, everything was disappearing behind a screaming panic that overtook him like a tornado.

‘Come on, come on,’ Napoleon said through the screaming in his ears. He was sitting on the steps. When had that happened? Napoleon’s hand was behind his head and he was lolling backwards as if his body had tried to faint. He felt a finger at his lips. ‘Swallow it, Illya. Just a little pill. Oh, yeah, thanks,’ he said as if to someone else, and then there was a cup at his lips and the water entering his mouth forced him to swallow. ‘No, he’ll be all right. Thank you,’ Napoleon said, and dimly Illya was aware of Del Floria hustling back into his shop. ‘Come on,’ Napoleon said, making him stand and walk, and in a blur he walked up the steps, and then he was sitting on a leather seat. He was in Napoleon’s car and Napoleon was next to him. ‘It’s all right, Illya,’ he said. ‘The doctor said that might happen. Just let the pill do its job, okay?’

‘I can’t,’ Illya said. The panic was so huge, so real. He wanted to scream, to sob, but he couldn’t catch enough air. He had endured weeks and weeks of the  _ zona _ without breaking down, but now he was paralysed by the cold air and the sky and the snow. ‘I can’t – can’t be out here. Can’t be outside.’

‘You’re with me,’ Napoleon told him gently. ‘I know it’s big, it’s scary, it’s horrible. You’re allowed to feel that. But you have to get home, and I’m going to get you home. I won’t let anything hurt you. This is a big step, but you’ll be all right.’

Illya squeezed his eyes shut and tried to ground himself. He felt as if everything were rocking around him, as if he were dwindling into non-existence. Then he felt Napoleon’s hands stroking his hands, gently making his clenched fists open until Napoleon could stroke his palms.

‘It’s all right,’ Napoleon said again. ‘Are you ready for me to drive?’

Illya didn’t feel like he would ever be ready to move, but he forced himself to nod. One of Napoleon’s hands left his, and he heard the engine start. The car moved away, but one of Napoleon’s hands stayed holding his.

‘It’s not far,’ Napoleon was saying. ‘Traffic’s pretty quiet too. I think people are staying off the roads because of the weather.’

Illya tried to breathe. He tried to keep himself grounded, to focus on Napoleon’s voice and Napoleon’s hand in his. He felt as if there were no oxygen in the air. But then the pill started to take hold, the edges started to soften. He drew in breath and it reached the bottom of his lungs. He reduced his iron grip on Napoleon’s hand.

‘Ah, blood flow,’ Napoleon said. ‘It’s a wonderful thing. Vastly underrated. You feeling a bit better now?’

‘A bit,’ Illya managed. He watched the road ahead, trying to focus on the lights and buildings instead of the snow. But the snow kept catching his eyes and kept making him think of the  _ zona, _ of the walk to the forest, of early mornings and dusk and terrible things. He felt as if he were going to vomit, and he pressed his hand against his mouth.

‘Hey,’ Napoleon asked. ‘Illya, you okay?’

‘Sick,’ he managed.

Napoleon stopped abruptly in the flow of traffic and Illya fumbled for the door handle and vomited into the street while horns all around them sounded.

‘Better?’ Napoleon asked as he closed the door and straightened up. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t have any water.’

Illya wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. The taste of acid was vile in his mouth. Napoleon got out of the car, heedless of the increasing sounds of horns and invectives, bought a cup of coffee from a sidewalk stand, and got back in, handing it to Illya.

‘That might help,’ he said.

Illya sipped at the coffee, and smiled.

‘Thank you, Napoleon,’ he said. ‘But you better move on before we get a ticket.’

‘Uh, yeah,’ Napoleon said, glancing in the rear view mirror. A cop was heading their way. He started the engine and moved off.

Illya kept sipping at the coffee. It was such a simple thing, such a simple taste, but the memories and associations it brought back were like a comfort blanket. He focussed on the dark liquid and the taste of it and the hot feel of it in his throat and stomach, and by the time he had finished the cup Napoleon was saying, ‘All right, Illya. We’re home. Are you ready?’

‘Your place?’ Illya asked.

‘My place. Is that okay?’

Illya nodded. ‘I – I’m happy for you to make the decisions, Napoleon,’ he said. ‘Just for now. I – I think I need that.’

‘Okay,’ Napoleon said softly. ‘My apartment. Pizza for dinner. We’re going to go upstairs and I’m going to light the fire and we can sit in front of the television all afternoon. Now, let’s get you inside.’

  


((O))

  


Inside, Napoleon watched Illya with a swelling ball of worry inside him. He had spoken at length with Dr Bainbridge about bringing his partner home. He knew what to expect. But somehow the reality felt so huge, so momentous. Illya felt like a fragile ornament waiting to break. He was wondering when the next panic attack would strike, and what would trigger it. He had closed the curtains because the falling snow seemed to bother Illya so much, but he was just as likely to be triggered by something seemingly insignificant, like looking down at a slice of bread in his hand, or a sudden loud noise.

There was a knock at the door and Napoleon jerked to his feet, glancing at Illya briefly before going to look through the spyhole. He opened the door on its chain, and the man outside said, ‘Got your pizza, Mr Solo.’

‘Ah, thank you,’ Napoleon said, releasing the chain and exchanging a handful of notes for the two boxes in the man’s hands. That was one of the benefits of ordering from a familiar place. One got to know the delivery boys and they got to know you.

He brought the boxes back to the coffee table and put one in front of Illya, opening it with a flourish.

‘There you are. Deep dish, five different types of cheese, and the best ham in Manhattan.’

Illya’s eyes widened. ‘Napoleon, how am I ever going to eat all of that?’

‘Slow and steady, partner. Slow and steady,’ Napoleon grinned. He went into the kitchen to grab a pizza cutter, and a carton of fruit juice and two glasses. He would have preferred beer, but Illya couldn’t drink with his medications. He handed Illya the pizza cutter. ‘Dig in.’

It was a joy to watch Illya ploughing through the huge pizza. He couldn’t manage it all, but the satisfaction on the Russian’s face was wonderful to see.

‘You’re going to get fat, Napoleon,’ Illya commented, looking over at Napoleon’s almost empty box.

‘Hmm.’ Napoleon regarded the box. ‘I guess I will at that, if I keep trying to match what you need to eat.’

‘You don’t need to feed me up,’ Illya said, but the statement seemed so ridiculous coming from someone so thin, with such hollow eyes, with the bones sticking up in his wrists.

‘I _want_ to feed you up.’ He reached over and closed Illya’s box. ‘Never mind. That’s breakfast, right there. I’ll go put it in the refrigerator. You ready for bed?’

Illya looked exhausted, but he shook his head.

‘We can stay up a little longer, can’t we?’

‘Illya, you look ready to fall down. You’ve had a very long day.’

Illya sighed. ‘Napoleon, I dream...’ he began.

Napoleon put a hand over his. ‘I know you do,’ he said. ‘But I’ll be right beside you all night. It’s not like the infirmary. Whenever you wake up I’ll be right there. Now, I’m going to put these leftovers away and then I’ll sort out your bedtime medication, and we’re going to go to bed.’

He went into the kitchen with the pizza boxes, then sorted out Illya’s cocktail of drugs from the list he had pinned to the wall, and came back with a glass of water. Illya was sitting with his eyes closed, rocking gently, and Napoleon sighed, crouching down in front of his partner.

‘Illya? Hey, Illya. Come on, swallow these down.’

Illya’s eyes blinked open, but he just stared at Napoleon vacantly.

‘Okay, we can do it in bed,’ Napoleon said. He pressed his hand over Illya’s then transferred the glass to the hand with the pills, and with the other he prompted Illya to stand. Illya followed him into the bedroom, but he looked dazed, and when Napoleon put the pills down on the nightstand with a clatter, he jumped.

‘Okay, pyjamas,’ Napoleon said, trying to stay normal, getting out a pair of Illya’s pyjamas and putting them on the bed. He had been to Illya’s apartment and brought up a number of things he thought he would need, and made space for them in his drawers. ‘Illya,’ Napoleon prompted him.

Illya fiddled with the pyjamas, then said very sincerely, ‘Napoleon, I think I want to go back to the infirmary.’

‘Oh, Illya...’ Napoleon smiled softly, then enveloped him in his arms. ‘You’ll be just fine here, I promise you. I’ll be here with you. What have they got that I can’t give you here?’

He stepped back, watching Illya’s face. Illya reached out vaguely in a motion Napoleon recognised. He had often moved his hand towards the emergency cord in his room, although he had rarely used it.

‘Illya, I’ll be right here beside you. You don’t need the cord,’ Napoleon assured him. ‘I’ll be right with you.’

There was a kind of sad desperation in Illya’s eyes that cut Napoleon to the heart. He tried to put himself in Illya’s place, to understand his fear at being away from a place that had doctors and nurses who would come at the touch of a button. But Bainbridge had assured him that Illya no longer needed that. He just needed a little time to realise that he would be all right.

‘Look, Illya, take this one,’ Napoleon said, holding up a red coloured pill and the glass of water. ‘That’s your sedative, the stronger one for night time. You take that and let it start working, and then we’ll tackle everything else, huh? Pyjamas, pills, teeth, you can wash your face, and then we can settle down in bed, okay?’

Illya plucked the tablet from Napoleon’s palm, and swallowed it. He smiled a little. ‘Pyjamas, pills, teeth, wash, bed,’ he repeated.

‘That’s it,’ Napoleon said, sensing that the idea of the routine would be helpful to Illya. ‘Pyjamas, pills, teeth, wash, bed. So, pyjamas first.’

And he helped Illya to change, because he still seemed half in another place, then walked with him through to the bathroom and guided him through the routine, then back into the bedroom. Illya lay down in bed with a decided unease, but Napoleon could see that the stronger sedative was starting to have an effect. Despite himself, his eyes were drifting closed, fluttering open, drifting closed again. Then he jerked awake with a sudden intake of breath, his foot kicking hard.

‘It’s all right. I’m still here,’ Napoleon assured him, and watched as his eyelids dropped again.

Illya drifted down into sleep again, but Napoleon couldn’t feel sleepy. He lay with his head turned towards Illya, just watching him as he breathed slowly in and out, as his eyes occasionally moved beneath the thin skin of his eyelids, as he moved a little and then settled again. After ten minutes he got up and moved softly over towards the bedroom door, picking up his communicator from the nightstand as he did.

‘Open Channel D,’ he said softly. ‘Mr Waverly.’

It was only a moment before the old man’s voice replied, ‘Yes, Mr Solo. You have Mr Kuryakin all settled?’

‘Yes, sir, he’s fast asleep,’ Napoleon said, leaning against the door frame so he could watch Illya. Mr Waverly had shown one of his rare moments of softness this afternoon when he had asked Napoleon to call in once the day was over, just to let him know that Illya was all right. For all of his bluster and careless front, Waverly cared deeply about his agents.

‘And you think he’s going to be all right, Mr Solo?’ Waverly asked.

‘Well,’ Napoleon said, watching as Illya moved a little in the bed. ‘I think so, sir. It’s too soon for any definites. He’s very raw still. Today’s been difficult for him. But Bainbridge thinks he’ll make it.’

‘Dr Bainbridge has never failed in his judgement yet,’ Waverly said. There was a long pause, and Napoleon heard the sound of a striking match. He pictured Waverly in his office, lighting up a pipe. At times he wondered if the old man ever slept. ‘It is terrible, Mr Solo, what man will do to man,’ he said reflectively.

Napoleon’s throat tightened as he imagined Illya in those threadbare camp clothes, as he imagined the violence and lust of the men who had raped him.

‘Yes, Mr Waverly,’ he said when he felt he could speak. ‘Yes, it is.’

‘Well, I’ll let you get back to it, Mr Solo,’ Waverly said, all of the quiet contemplation gone from his voice. ‘I’ll let Dr Bainbridge know that his patient is all right.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ Napoleon said, and then closed the channel. He slipped back into bed and lay there just watching Illya again, half afraid to fall asleep because he was waiting for something to happen. But eventually the warmth took him, and he slipped into dreams.

  


((O))

  


Illya woke with a scream trapped in his throat, pushing at the man on top of him, pushing hard but failing to make him move because every time he pushed his hands went straight through as if the man were made of decomposing flesh. But he moved like a man in his prime, thrusting hard, driving into Illya’s body so hard that he could feel the twisting pain all the way up, through his pelvis, through his abdomen, right up to his ribs. He flailed, trying to make his voice work, pleading, trying to get away. And then there were hands on his arms holding him, and a voice speaking, not in Russian.

‘Illya. Illya, it’s a dream. Wake up, honey. Wake up. Come on, Illya...’

Light suddenly flooded the room, and Illya lay blinking, panting, his pyjamas drenched in sweat and his heart thudding against his ribs.

‘Oh god, oh god,’ he murmured in Russian. ‘Oh, god, please...’

‘Illya, wake up.’ It was Napoleon kneeling on the bed next to him, his hair tousled and worry in his eyes. ‘Come on, honey.’

Illya gasped in breath, staring around himself. There was Napoleon’s bed all around him, the walls of Napoleon’s room, his pictures and furniture. Nothing else, no one else. Just Napoleon looking at him with that expression of deep concern.

‘N-napoleon?’ he asked.

‘You were dreaming, Illya,’ Napoleon said.

Illya managed a rueful smile, trying to push away the ghost of the nightmare. ‘I told you I would dream.’

‘And I told you I’d be here, and I am. Now, here,’ Napoleon said, passing him a glass of water. ‘Have a drink, and go back to sleep.’

Illya had a drink, but he didn’t want to go back to sleep. He lay with his head on the pillow, staring at the ceiling, forcing his eyes wide open.

‘Come on, Illya, you need to sleep,’ Napoleon urged him.

‘I don’t want to go to sleep,’ Illya said. ‘I don’t want to dream.’

‘I know,’ Napoleon said. ‘But you need to. Now, come on. Close your eyes.’

Napoleon began to gently stroke his fingers over the planes of Illya’s face, over his forehead and cheeks.

‘Close your eyes,’ Napoleon said again, ‘and I’ll tell you a story. A very boring story all about – uh – about a man who planted an enormous turnip...’

Illya tried to control his breathing, tried to summon all of the relaxation techniques that Bainbridge had taught him, and just listened to Napoleon’s voice as it droned softly on about the enormous turnip. It was such a stupid story, and when it finished Napoleon moved on to another equally foolish, and eventually Illya couldn’t listen any more, and fell asleep.

  


((O))

  


Napoleon woke to the scent of food cooking, and lay there blearily for a few moments before working out what was going on. It had been a terrible night, with Illya waking every few hours from bad dreams, one of which had transformed into a panic attack that kept them both awake for over an hour. So Napoleon actually felt a warm relief when he looked over at the clock and realised it was almost ten in the morning. He had last woken at six, so he’d managed a full four hour’s sleep.

He grimaced. When was the last time he thought four hours sleep in his own bed was a boon?

Illya was in the kitchen, frying up ham and eggs, and although he looked pale, and thin as ever, he seemed light-hearted. Napoleon had thought to bring some of Illya’s jazz records up here, and he had put one on the player, quietly so as not to wake Napoleon.

‘Illya,’ Napoleon said, coming into the kitchen, and Illya jumped so badly that the egg he was holding smashed onto the floor.

‘Hey, I didn’t mean to scare you,’ Napoleon said as Illya crouched with a cloth in his hand to wipe up the mess. ‘Thanks for letting me sleep.’

Illya gave a twisted little smile. ‘You needed it after what I did to you last night.’

Napoleon put a hand on his shoulder, then crouched and kissed the side of his head. ‘Hey, no guilt. You promised. I knew what I was letting myself in for.’

‘I could sleep in the spare bedroom,’ Illya suggested as he washed out the cloth.

‘No,’ Napoleon said firmly. ‘I want to be with you. No sleeping in separate bedrooms.’ He glanced at the kitchen clock. ‘I guess we’d better get eating. You’re seeing Bainbridge at half past eleven, aren’t you?’

Illya’s hand clenched on the spatula. ‘Yes,’ he said quietly.

‘Have you taken your morning cocktail?’ Napoleon asked.

‘No.’

‘Had a bowel movement?’

Illya grimaced then. ‘No, not yet.’

‘Well, then, we’ve got a lot to tick off our list.’

Napoleon’s thoughts drifted away as he remembered that awful examination on Illya’s first day in the infirmary, when he had learnt about the extent of the healing tears and the deep, deep bruising and abrasions that Illya was suffering. It was important that his bowel movements were soft and regular, and that they were checked for bleeding. He hated how much pain Illya was in each time he used the toilet.

He went to the bathroom cabinet and sorted out Illya’s morning pills; a lighter sedative, the antidepressant, the laxative, and various vitamins. When he put them on the kitchen counter Illya sighed. It was an uphill struggle getting him to take them every single time.

‘I feel all right this morning,’ he protested.

‘Really?’ Napoleon asked cynically. ‘Anyway, it doesn’t matter. The effects are cumulative. You have to stay on track.’

So Illya sighed again and took the drugs.

  


((O))

  


Napoleon started notching up the things that inclined Illya towards panic, the definite things that were obvious to him. The falling snow. Facing strangers. Changes in his expected routine. But it was so hard to get a handle on everything because so often the stimulus seemed to come from inside Illya. Something so small as to be apparently insignificant would trigger a memory, and then he would either drift into dissociation, or panic. He knew that meeting Waverly today would trigger one of those things, but it had got to the point where Illya couldn’t avoid it any longer. Waverly had waited for over a week, agreeing not to bother Illya while he was in the Psych wing, but there was only so long for which one could put off the old man.

Napoleon ferried Illya to his counselling session and then went to his office, despite officially being on leave. He thought the more work he could do now the more generous Waverly might be later, because he didn’t have illusions that Illya would just snap out of this in a week’s time. But in the end he didn’t work. He sat staring at paperwork on his desk for a while, and then he was aware of someone shaking his arm, and it was one of the secretaries holding a cup of coffee.

‘Oh god,’ he muttered, coming awake with a jerk and staring confusedly at the clock. ‘What time is it?’

‘Just a little after one, Mr Solo. I thought you could do with some coffee.’

‘Ah, thanks – uh – ’ He looked up at the woman, blinking. ‘Wanda. Thank you. It was a long night.’

He had thanked god that they didn’t keep his partner in after the first week, both for Illya’s sake and his own, because lying at home worrying about him was terrible, and he couldn’t get any sleep in the little rooms at headquarters designed for exhausted agents to take their rest. But this first night back at home had been the worst night Napoleon had had in six days.

Wanda gave him an arch look, but Napoleon shook that off. It had been a long time since he had been kept up all night by a woman, but his reputation just wouldn’t fade. Of course that wasn’t to say that Illya didn’t keep him up all night sometimes…

He flushed and then felt terrible as he remembered lust filled nights with Illya, and then the contrast of last night, Illya waking in terror so often, and having to bring him back down. The pressure of it all came over him in a wave, and to his fury he felt tears starting in his eyes.

‘How is Mr Kuryakin?’ Wanda asked, apparently reading his expression.

Napoleon rubbed his hand over his face as if brushing sleep from his eyes. ‘Oh, er, as well as can be expected,’ he said evasively.

‘We all miss him,’ she said.

_ So do I _ , Napoleon thought, but he said, ‘Well, he’ll be all right. In the end. It’s just going to take time.’

‘People are saying it was a top secret mission.’

‘People shouldn’t be saying anything,’ Napoleon said uncharitably. Then he smiled. ‘Look, I’m sorry, Wanda. It’s been a strain. Thanks for the coffee. Thanks for waking me up. I need to get down to the infirmary...’

‘You want for me to go down and fetch Illya for you?’ she asked rather hopefully.

‘Uh, no. No thank you, Wanda. That wouldn’t do. No, I need to go down there.’

She smiled indulgently, patted his shoulder, and left. Napoleon took a gulp of the hot, black liquid, then shoved his papers back in the filing cabinet and took the cup with him as he made his way down to Psych. Illya was sitting on one of the chairs outside Bainbridge’s office, staring at his knees, with a nurse beside him trying to engage him in conversation. By the look on Illya’s face Napoleon thought he was more likely to hit her than talk to her, and he wondered why the nurse didn’t see that.

‘Hey, partner,’ he said, and Illya’s head jerked up. He looked as if he had been thrown a lifeline.

‘Napoleon,’ he said with real warmth in his voice.

‘All finished?’

Illya glanced at the nurse. ‘Yes, although Nurse Hopkins seems to think I need an amateur session,’ he said in a cutting tone.

Napoleon gave the nurse an apologetic look, and took Illya out of the department. Normally he would have made a comment about Illya’s rudeness, but today he didn’t.

‘Maybe we can pick up some lunch on the way home,’ Illya said. ‘I’m starving.’

Napoleon glanced at him. ‘Er, we’re going to see Mr Waverly,’ he said rather tentatively. ‘I couldn’t put him off any longer.’

Illya’s step faltered, then he said, ‘Oh, I forgot...’

Napoleon felt him drifting away. Although Illya continued to walk alongside him, his eyes were distant. He was no longer there.

‘Illya,’ he said gently as they entered Waverly’s outer office. ‘Hey, Illya.’

Illya’s eyes snapped back, and he smiled tightly. ‘I’m not made of glass, Napoleon.’

Napoleon suppressed his sigh and met the secretary’s eyes instead.

‘Go right in,’ she said.

Illya looked almost as if he were entering the office for the first time, the way he stared about at the contents. But then Napoleon realised that he was just letting his eyes fall on all the familiar things, and he dared to hope that this would actually be good for Illya. This place had been the scene of so many briefings, casual chats, adrenaline-filled emergencies. It was the heart of U.N.C.L.E., more so than their shared office. He recalled sitting here sharing a Martini with Illya on so many occasions, and smiled.

‘Ah, Mr Kuryakin,’ Waverly said, rising from his chair, an uncharacteristic gentleness in his voice. ‘It’s good to see you at last.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Illya said rather distractedly, his eyes on Waverly’s wooden humidor. Then he stood mute, waiting.

‘Well, sit down, gentlemen,’ Waverly said, his eyes staying keenly on Illya. As they sat he said, ‘Mr Kuryakin, U.N.C.L.E. is not in the business of giving medals, but I want you to know that you have my highest commendation for your part in this affair. You were under no obligation, and you suffered the greatest – well – ’

He trailed off in awkwardness. Illya’s fingers were picking at the leather pad on the desk in front of him and Napoleon recognised a difficult sound in his breathing. Illya was either going to space out or panic. He met Waverly’s eyes and tried to telegraph his concern to him, then put his hand onto Illya’s thigh under the desk and rubbed it gently.

‘I – er – think we’d better make this brief, sir,’ he said quietly.

‘Well, I was rather hoping for some kind of debriefing,’ Waverly said, knocking ash out of his pipe into the ashtray.

‘I don’t think that will be possible,’ Napoleon said baldly.

‘No, I can see that,’ Waverly nodded. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Kuryakin. I truly am sorry.’

Illya seemed to make an enormous effort, and said tightly, ‘Yes, sir.’

‘Well. Well, then...’ Waverly seemed at a loss. ‘Would you gentlemen like some coffee before you go?’

‘No, sir, thank you,’ Napoleon said, answering for Illya, but to his consternation, Illya was suddenly crying, sobbing as if his heart were breaking. He looked up at Waverly, and Waverly looked back, utterly bewildered. Then he said quietly, ‘Mr Solo, I’ll leave you alone for a little while. I’ll have my secretary give you privacy. When you’re ready, go home. We won’t have Mr Kuryakin involved in anything work-related until he feels ready.’

As Napoleon thanked him he walked out of the room looking extremely disconcerted. Napoleon turned his attention immediately to Illya, taking him in his arms and just holding him. He had seen this reaction in him after previous counselling sessions. Talking for so long seemed to loosen his barriers and make tears come easily. It was never nice to see Illya in such a state. He had always been so self-contained. But he thought it was marginally better than watching through the agony of a panic attack. Eventually Illya calmed and Napoleon brought him a glass of water. Illya smiled at him wanly.

‘I’ve made an enormous fool of myself, haven’t I, Napoleon?’ he asked.

‘Not at all,’ Napoleon promised, but privately he thought the best thing would be to get Illya out of here as soon as possible. There were too many people here to see him and pass comment. He hated people to see Illya like this, because this wasn’t Illya, not the Illya that any of them knew.

‘I shouldn’t have brought you here straight after counselling,’ he said. ‘I know how hard those sessions are for you.

Illya walked over to the small alcove that held coffee facilities and a sink, and splashed water over his face.

‘I should have had the strength to say no. I’ll try to do better,’ he said.

‘You’ll take it as it comes,’ Napoleon told him. ‘Now, are you ready to go home? Or we could go to our office. I just think Waverly would probably rather we weren’t tying up his suite.’

‘Home,’ Illya said. ‘Just home.’

‘All right. Home. Fire, TV, dinner, bed, yes?’

‘Fire, lunch, TV, dinner, bed,’ Illya said. ‘And I’ll try not to act like a lunatic.’

‘Why break the habit of a lifetime?’ Napoleon risked the banter, and Illya shot him a look.

‘You were always more the lunatic than me,’ he said. ‘I suppose it’s only fair I should take my turn. _ ’ _

‘You okay to leave?’

Illya smiled. ‘I’m okay,’ he said. Then his face sobered. ‘It’s just that – everyone I see, I feel like they can see straight through my skin, Napoleon, like they can see exactly what happened. I must look so foul to them...’

‘Oh, Illya,’ Napoleon said. ‘You know that’s not true, don’t you?’

He half smiled. ‘I know it’s not true, but I still feel it.’

Napoleon put an arm around his shoulders and hugged him. ‘I’d deck the first person who said anything.’

‘Yes, I know you would,’ Illya nodded. ‘I know. You’re my shield. So let’s go home.’

  


((O))

  


Illya fell asleep in the car driving home, and when he parked Napoleon sat for a while, unsure what to do. He didn’t want to wake his partner, but it was getting cold just sitting in the car.

‘Illya,’ he said finally. ‘We’re home, and it’s getting chilly.’

Illya’s eyes snapped open, and he stared confusedly for a moment before murmuring something in Russian, then saying, ‘I’m sorry, Napoleon. I didn’t mean to fall asleep.’

‘You’re worn out,’ Napoleon said. ‘Go straight to bed if you want when we get in. Have a proper sleep.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘No, I don’t want to lose a day like that. Besides, I won’t be able to sleep tonight.’

He opened the door and got out, straight into the path of a New York cop, who was forced to stumble back.

‘Hey, you almost hit me with that,’ the cop began, but his tone was not unfriendly.

Napoleon saw it happen, saw the breath catch in Illya’s chest, the widening of his eyes. He was out of the car and around to Illya almost before he knew what he was doing. The snow was falling again and the man was in uniform, and Illya had been taken straight back to the  _ zona.  _ His mouth was gaping open, his face had drained of all colour.

‘Hey, mister,’ the cop said, obviously realising something was odd here.

Napoleon flashed his card. ‘It’s all right, officer,’ he said calmly.

Illya spoke, but it was in Russian, his voice strained, and he faltered back towards the car, his head dropping, his arms wrapping around his body.

‘Illya,’ Napoleon said, putting a hand on his arm. ‘It’s all right.’

But Illya was leaning against the car and his breath was starting to come in gasps, and he slid down into a huddled ball.

‘He’s working through some problems,’ Napoleon said at the police officer’s expression.

The man fingered the gun at his hip. ‘You think maybe he’d be better working through them inside somewhere? Like in an asylum? He dangerous?’

‘ _ No!’ _ Napoleon said instantly, although he couldn’t honestly swear Illya might not be dangerous in the wrong situation. His partner was trained to kill. ‘Believe me, officer, he just needs to get inside. It’s been a tough day. He’ll be all right.’

‘Well...’ the officer said.

‘Look, officer. I’m with the U.N.C.L.E.. He’s under my care. I live right here. We’re just about to go inside. Please, just – it would be easier on my own. Okay?’

‘Okay,’ the man said rather reluctantly. ‘Just don’t let him loiter out here. He’ll create a public nuisance. All right?’

‘All right,’ Napoleon said, biting back all of his anger. He just wanted to get Illya inside. He couldn’t really blame the cop for his reaction, because Illya’s behaviour probably seemed utterly bewildering. ‘Illya, come on. Let’s get inside, hey?’

Illya was still crouched on the ground and he didn’t reply. Napoleon gently put a hand on top of his head, and looked back to the police officer.

‘I promise, I will get him inside. He just needs a little space.’

The man gave Illya a suspicious look, then looked back to Napoleon, but he nodded, and started to walk away. Napoleon crouched down in front of Illya, putting his hands on his arms. He bent his head forwards until his forehead was against Illya’s, and for a moment he just stayed like that.

‘Come on,’ he said after a little while. ‘Illya, I need you to come inside now. You’re going to freeze out here.’

Illya gave a small, muffled snort that almost sounded like a laugh, and then he looked up very slowly. Napoleon pulled back from him enough to see the apologetic look in his eyes.

‘It was so much colder back there,’ he said.

Napoleon rubbed his arm. ‘I know, Illya,’ he said.

He had been there too. He had lived in the freezing cold in a tent for a month. But he had had a heater and arctic clothing, and at times the tent had actually been quite cosy. He couldn’t bear to think of Illya being exposed to such conditions for so long. He could so easily have become ill, and so easily have died.

‘Come on,’ he said, and Illya began to uncurl himself stiffly, and stood up.

‘It was just – ’ he began, walking with Napoleon towards the stoop and the door.

‘I know,’ Napoleon said. ‘The uniform, the snow. He came on you suddenly. It’s all right.’

Illya shuddered as they went in through the door and over to the elevator.

‘But it’s not all right, is it, Napoleon?’ he asked as the elevator doors slid closed. ‘I – I can hardly function. How will I ever – ’

‘Shush,’ Napoleon said, cradling his hands either side of Illya’s head. ‘You will,’ he promised. ‘You’re getting better. You will be well again.’

The door opened on their floor and he walked Illya down the hall and let them both in to his apartment. Once the door was closed behind them he put his hands on Illya’s head again, drawing him forward a little and kissing his forehead. But Illya was pensive and drawn in, and he turned away, shaking his head.

‘ Napoleon, what if I don’t? What if taking that mission has screwed me up for the rest of my life? I don’t know why I ever – ’

‘ Hey,’ Napoleon said softly. He caught Illya’s hands to stop him from moving away. ‘Illya, look at me,’ he said.

Illya lifted his head, but he kept his eyes downcast.

‘ No,  _ look  _ at me,’ Napoleon said forcefully. He put a finger under Illya’s chin, until Illya lifted his eyes and Napoleon looked into their blue depths. ‘Now, answer me some questions. What was your mission in the Soviet Union?’

Illya looked momentarily bewildered. ‘To – extract Permyakov,’ he said in a questioning tone.

‘Why?’ Napoleon asked. ‘Why did we need to extract Permyakov?’

‘ Because – he was a world class physicist. Because the United States needed him to help make nuclear power clean and safe. Because – ’

‘Because bringing him out would save millions of lives,’ Napoleon said softly. ‘You remember that, don’t you?’

‘Yes,’ Illya said, but his voice was faltering. ‘Yes, I – ’

‘Illya, we are agents,’ Napoleon said, and his voice became a little harder. ‘You and I both. We risk our lives day to day to make the world safer for everyone. You know that.’

Illya gave a strange laugh. He pulled away from Napoleon’s hands and walked away into the kitchen. Napoleon followed him. He was standing at the sink, pouring himself a glass of water. He stood there and drank it steadily, as if he were fortifying himself with vodka.

‘Running water, and heat, and good bread are the triumphs of our civilisation,’ Illya said, staring into his glass.

‘Illya,’ Napoleon said, holding out a hand.

‘I forgot what it was like to eat good food, to eat enough of it to feel full,’ Illya murmured. ‘I forgot what it was like to drink water that hadn’t been pulled up from a frozen well with a dirty bucket. I forgot what it was like to have warm feet and hands.’

Napoleon came closer to him, took the empty glass from him, put it down on the counter.

‘I know,’ he said softly.

‘I forgot what it was like to wear clean, warm clothes,’ Illya said. ‘I forgot what proper toilets were like. I forgot what it was like to – to own my – ’

He faltered, his mouth working but no words coming out. He gestured vaguely at his own body, shaking his head.

‘You never stopped owning yourself,’ Napoleon said gently. ‘Illya, no matter what they did to you, they never owned you.’

Tears spilled over onto his cheeks. He shook his head, trying to speak, trying to form words.

‘I didn’t – You didn’t – They owned every part of me. Napoleon, they – ’

‘Hey.’ Napoleon caught him into his arms, folding him tightly against his own chest. ‘Illya, they never owned you.’

A kind of tremor ran through Illya’s body and he pulled away violently, retreating across the room.

‘You don’t  _ know! _ ’ he shouted, his voice becoming hysterical, his hands moving, grasping out for something and not finding it. ‘You don’t know what it was  _ like! _ You have  _ no _ idea what it was – what it was – ’

Napoleon held up his hands then, shaking his head. ‘All right,’ he said gently. ‘All right. You’re right. I don’t. I’m sorry. But you – ’

‘ _ No _ , Napoleon,’ Illya half screamed. ‘No. No  _ but.  _ There isn’t a but. You just don’t – you don’t – ’

Abruptly he turned and strode out of the kitchen. Following, Napoleon heard another door slam, and saw that Illya had gone into the bathroom and locked the door. He got there within seconds and rattled the handle, then rested his head against the door.

‘Illya,’ he said, but there wasn’t a reply. ‘Illya, let me in.’

No answer. He could hear Illya’s ragged breathing, but nothing else. He ran mentally through what was in there. Both their razors. The medicine cabinet. The mirror which could be broken into shards. His heart stuttered.

‘Illya,’ he tried again. ‘Illya, you know I have ways of opening doors. I don’t want to have to melt my own lock. Will you please let me in?’

‘I just want to be alone,’ Illya said after a space of silence.

‘Illya, you can’t,’ Napoleon pressed. ‘You know you can’t. You know why.’

‘I – just want to be alone,’ Illya said again, and this time Napoleon heard the hitch in his voice.

‘God damn it,’ he murmured, and he felt in his pockets for the putty, snapped a detonator button from his cuff, and pressed both over the lock. He activated it with his watch, shielding his eyes, and after the flash and the hiss the door swung open. Illya was sitting huddled on the floor, arms around his knees, weeping. To Napoleon’s relief the medicine cabinet was still closed, and the razors were still on the shelf above the basin.

‘Go away, Napoleon,’ Illya murmured.

‘No,’ Napoleon said.

He sat down on the floor, near to Illya but not touching him, and just waited. It took time. It took far too much time, feeling like he was an ocean away from Illya despite being so close. But eventually Illya moved just a little, shuffled closer, and leant his head against Napoleon’s chest. Napoleon wrapped his arms around him and just held him, not talking or trying to rationalise anything, but just holding him while he cried.


	9. Chapter 9

Napoleon hadn’t expected to spend so long on the psychiatrist’s couch himself. Dr Bainbridge spent long hours talking with Napoleon about ‘gross stress reaction,’ giving the reasons for Illya’s response to his trauma, what his likely outcome was, how to deal with him and support him at home. He talked frankly with Napoleon about his relationship with Illya, and it was a relief to be able to unburden himself about that with someone sworn to confidentiality. When Napoleon was talking to Dr Bainbridge Illya was going through his physical exams, or napping, after the gruelling psychological sessions, in one of the patients’ rooms, and when they drove home afterwards they both felt drained. But it was good to talk. It was so good for Napoleon to be able to talk honestly about Illya, to not feel judged or condemned, but just listened to.

Illya was getting better. Bainbridge assured him of that. But it was so hard looking after this small Russian who had always been so strong, but now seemed so fragile both physically and mentally. He was so thin Napoleon was afraid of breaking him, and mentally one moment Illya appeared completely fine but the next had drifted away into another place. Although the two weeks Waverly had given Napoleon were ostensibly vacation, he didn’t think he would feel rested at any point. He felt utterly blessed just to have Illya there with him, that he hadn’t been chewed up and totally destroyed by the Soviet state labour system, but  it was so, so strange, dealing with all of this.

Right now Illya was sitting on the sofa, tucking heartily in to a meal on the tray on his lap. He was wearing slacks and a tie-less shirt, collar unbuttoned and sleeves rolled up because Napoleon had the heating on high, determined that his partner should never be cold again. But he was just as likely to be triggered into a panic attack by something Napoleon wasn’t even aware of, or to drift away into a kind of catatonia which he had tried to describe to Napoleon variously as non-being or non-existence, or floating in a void, and Napoleon didn’t know how to process that at all. It was exhausting always having to be ready to react, to talk or hug him out of panic, to anchor him when he felt he was dwindling into non-existence. Evenings and night times were worst of all, because the growing chill and evening light reminded him of horrors to come, and sleep gave him nightmares.

The television warbled away, and that was an oddity in itself. They hardly ever turned the screen on when they were together, unless there was a concert or play or movie that Illya particularly wanted to see. On the screen now was a British wildlife documentary with a young and earnest presenter, and Illya seemed glued to the screen, smiling in delight at the array of animals. His lips were slightly parted, his fork hovering in the air, and the abstracted expression of fascination on his face was straight from the past. Napoleon could see through the thinness and the fuzz of dark gold hair and the scratches old and new on his forearms and remember how he had been before all of this.

‘I don’t think you’ll be able to catch the end,’ he mentioned.

They were going to Phelps’ apartment later for the mission debriefing. Napoleon was in two minds as to whether Illya should go, but Illya had been determined. Dr Bainbridge had told him to try to live as normally as possible, and Illya had interpreted that as needing to force himself past what he had decided was the rank foolishness of his brain, and never decide to be easy on himself.

At Napoleon’s words, Illya’s hands tightened on his cutlery, and his knuckles whitened. He swallowed what was in his mouth, then he put his cutlery down and said with forced ease, ‘Well, I’ve seen this before anyway.’

Napoleon regarded him. Illya was still looking at the screen, deliberately not looking at Napoleon. His cheeks still looked hollow after almost two weeks of good food, and he was still rather pale. His shoulders looked much more angled than usual under his white shirt, and the vertebrae of his neck were visible, leading down like a string of beads under his collar. His right hand idly moved to his left arm and he started to scratch at an undamaged place between the crusted scabs of his previous self-inflicted wounds.

‘Illya, are you sure you want to go?’ Napoleon asked him. He had been doing pretty well the last few days, after his daily counselling sessions with Dr Bainbridge, but today he had been very much on edge, and Napoleon was sure it was in anticipation of tonight’s meeting. He didn’t want to see him start harming again.

Illya’s hand snapped into a fist, and he dropped it to his lap. He rocked slightly. Napoleon put his own meal aside and slid closer to Illya on the cushions, nudging his right arm up against Illya’s left. He slipped his arm around Illya’s shoulders, and hugged him.

‘You’ll spill my dinner,’ Illya said.

Napoleon sighed. Illya accepted hugs, and even kisses, but he had to tread very carefully, because any touch below the waist, even accidental, made him freeze. He had read the doctor’s report after Illya’s physical, at Illya’s insistence, and had been sickened by the implications in that neat slanting handwriting about the violence and frequency of the rapes. Dr Bainbridge had made it very clear that penetration would be out of the question for some time, but that in any case Illya would almost certainly heal physically before he was ready mentally for such a step. Napoleon couldn’t stand the thought of it anyway. He couldn’t imagine ever submitting Illya to that after what he had suffered.

‘Oh, Napoleon, look at those marmosets!’ Illya exclaimed, pointing at the screen, and Napoleon looked, and smiled because Illya was smiling. But he still wasn’t sure how Illya would take to visiting Jim’s apartment.

Illya started scooping the last of his meal into his mouth again. Napoleon got up and went over to the sideboard, where a small array of bottles stood. He picked them up and looked at them, and shook out a number of pills. Antibiotics, vitamins, a sedative, and an antidepressant were among them. He glanced at the chart he had pinned to the wall to be sure he had the right tablets, then brought them over to Illya with a glass of water just as the Russian scraped up the very last scrap of food on the plate and put the tray aside.

‘All right, time for your cocktail,’ he said with a smile, crouching down in front of Illya. The Russian’s face registered dismay.

‘Again? Must I?’

‘You must,’ Napoleon said firmly.

Illya grimaced. ‘This,’ he said, picking up the antidepressant, ‘makes my mouth dry and it makes my vision blurry,’ he complained. ‘I hate it.’

‘You still need to take it,’ Napoleon insisted.

‘Did you  _ read _ the list of possible side effects?’

Napoleon smiled tolerantly. ‘Yes, my love. I read the accompanying literature for every single one of your medications, including the vitamins. I know the possible side effects. But they’re going to help you.’

Illya shook his head and turned away a little, looking mutinous. Napoleon waited patiently. He knew all about the side effects, and had spoken earnestly with Dr Bainbridge about them. It was for that reason that he spent so much time watching Illya, because on rare occasions the pills could make a patient more inclined to be suicidal in the early days. That seemed bizarre to him, for an antidepressant, but he had trusted Bainbridge’s reassurances, and knew Illya needed to take the pills.

‘Let’s do this bit by bit,’ he said. ‘Look, here’s your painkiller and your vitamins and iron. Will you take those first?’

Illya took the pills.

‘All right, now the antibiotic and the laxative. You know how important they are.’

One of the side effects of the antidepressant was constipation, and it was important to avoid that considering the rectal damage Illya had suffered. Illya plucked the bullet-like tablets from Napoleon’s palm and swallowed them too. Then Napoleon held out the sedative and the antidepressant.

‘All right. Now you’re going to take these ones. I’m not having any arguments. That was the first condition of your release from the infirmary, remember? That you  _ would  _ take your medication.’

Illya grimaced again, but he swallowed the tablets, then made a lip-smacking sound as he moved his mouth in disgust.

‘I feel like I’ve got a desert in my mouth. A bad tasting desert.’

Napoleon rose up on his toes and leant forward to kiss Illya’s forehead, and was gratified that he didn’t flinch away from the touch.

‘Well, how about I replace the desert with dessert?’ he asked, pushing himself to his feet. He went into the kitchen and came back with a jug of pouring cream and a luxurious chocolate torte that had cost him a fortune in the patisserie three blocks away. He was determined to feed Illya with the best food he could lay his hands on until his weight was back to normal. Illya had picked up a journal and slipped on his reading glasses by the time Napoleon got back, but his eyes widened as he set the torte down on the coffee table.

‘Napoleon, do you think we can eat all of that?’ he asked.

Napoleon grinned. ‘We can darn well try,’ he said, cutting an enormous slice for Illya and slipping it onto a plate. He poured a small flood of cream over the top and passed it over with a spoon.

The sight of Illya eating something like that usually sent him over the edge, since his partner invariably ended up sucking stray bits of sticky chocolate from his fingertips and licking it from his lips. He watched Illya now, and he started to feel that shiver of desire the first time Illya sucked a finger into his mouth and the pointed end of his tongue just came out to slip over the tip. But then he remembered everything that had happened, and it was like cold water dousing him. Damn it. Bainbridge had suggested that Napoleon would probably need more of his own counselling sessions, and he feared he was right.

Illya glanced up over his tinted glasses and smiled ruefully.

‘Dr Bainbridge said it would probably take a long time for both of us,’ he said, accurately reading Napoleon’s expression. ‘But it will be all right in the end.’

Napoleon laid a hand over his lover’s, then leant in to kiss his cheek, satisfied with just the sweet chocolatey scent of his partner’s breath without having to press anything more on him.

  


((O))

  


The New York winter air was bitter by eight p.m., and small, dry flakes of snow were falling to dust the roads and sidewalks when Napoleon and Illya walked to the car. Illya was glad of the fur-lined hat that Napoleon had bought for him, a surprise gift on his release from the infirmary. The rabbit fur was exquisitely soft against his shorn head, and warm too. His hands were protected by soft leather gloves, and Napoleon had bought him a dark knee-length winter coat too, which was a little too large, but would fit perfectly once he had regained weight.

‘You look wonderful,’ Napoleon had said just before they left the apartment, and he had said it so sincerely that Illya believed it despite the whispering voices of self-loathing in his mind. When Napoleon looked at him like that he felt clean.

Napoleon held the car door open for him, and he slipped into the passenger seat. It was cold in the car too, and there was not a hint of moisture in the air to distort the lights that shone from Manhattan’s towering giants a few blocks away. New York always did look beautiful on crisp winter nights. It took his breath away, made him feel small, but in a good way.

‘You have your pills?’ Napoleon asked, glancing across at him from behind the wheel.

Illya patted his pocket and the bottle rattled. He could take a couple more sedatives tonight if necessary. He hoped it wouldn’t be necessary.

Napoleon put the car into gear, and moved off. Illya closed his eyes and let the vibrations travel through his spine and into the base of his skull. It was almost unbelievable that this was reality. Maybe that was why he kept slipping back into sordid memory. How could this comfort and luxury be true for him? How could any of it be real?

He clung to the arm rest on the door to try to anchor himself against the flashbacks. He opened his eyes and stared at the lights against the blue-black sky, at the walking pedestrians huddled against the cold. He felt nauseous, and his chest was tightening. It was all so much... He didn’t know if he could hang on...

Napoleon was opening the car door and offering his arm. When Illya took it and stood, Napoleon wrapped him in a hard hug.

‘Are you all right?’ he whispered in Illya’s ear.

Illya nodded, his head against Napoleon’s neck and shoulder, breathing in the real scent of him. Napoleon was the most real thing there was.

‘I’ll manage,’ he said. He didn’t want to let go, but he did. They walked into the lobby of Jim’s building and the doorman touched his cap and waved them to the elevator. In the elevator Illya turned his back on the mirror and held onto the rail that ran around the small cubicle, trying to feel grounded. Napoleon’s eyes stayed on him, anxious and caring, and when the doors opened he put his arm around Illya’s shoulders to walk him across to Jim’s door.

They were all there, Jim and Rollin, Cinnamon, and Willy and Barney. But what struck Illya first was the towering real pine Christmas tree up near the balcony doors, glittering with baubles and other sparkling things. Illya had forgotten how close it was to Christmas, or to the Western Christmas, at any rate.

‘Oh,’ he said with startled softness at the beauty of it, and Jim Phelps smiled and ushered them into the room, taking their coats and pressing drinks into their hands. Illya opened his mouth to mention that he couldn’t have alcohol, then realised that his glass contained grape juice. ‘Thank you,’ he said.

‘That reminds me, I should get my tree up,’ Napoleon smiled at Illya. Illya enjoyed taking over the decorating of the tree every year, and doing it with precise perfection, since to him Napoleon’s way of decorating seemed akin to throwing the box of ornaments at it and hoping for the best. Every year Napoleon insisted on celebrating Christmas on two days, December 25th and the Russian Orthodox January 7th, and although that seemed excessive Illya never argued because it meant two good meals, and for the second Napoleon always cooked Russian food.

‘Illya, how are you feeling?’ Jim asked, putting a warm arm around his shoulders and taking him towards the sofa.

‘Oh – I – ’ He looked at the floor, not sure how to answer honestly. The situation was so incredibly complicated, and he was being assailed with conflicting thoughts as he saw all these people gathered here who had meant so many different things to him while he had been in the Soviet Union on the mission. ‘I’m fine,’ he faltered.

Jim’s arm squeezed his shoulders, and Illya thought he probably understood, as far as he could. Illya sat on the sofa and tried to attend to proceedings as if he weren’t mad. Jim strolled about the room summing up the case and doling out individual praise to each operative in a way that would have made Mr Waverly tut at American excess. When it came to his praise of Illya, which was glowing, Illya looked just past him instead of at him and tried to respond correctly, but he felt as if his chest were being compressed by iron bands, the memories rushing in, in a kaleidoscope of uncontrollable images. He wished that he had one of those red emergency cords constantly dangling at his side, because he couldn’t speak. Then he jerked precipitately to his feet and managed, ‘Toilet,’ before making for the bathroom, where he sat on the closed toilet and rocked and fought not to dig his fingers into his arms.

After a minute Napoleon entered the room. Illya was fighting to hold on to reality, moans forcing themselves through his closely pressed lips. Napoleon spoke to him clearly and gently, trying to bring him back. Illya wrenched his eyes open and fixed on Napoleon, fighting hard for control.

Napoleon slipped a little white pill between his lips, and lifted a glass to his mouth.

‘Come on, now, swallow it down. And try to breathe, huh?’

Illya managed a smile. ‘I’m breathing,’ he said, ‘or I’d be cyanotic.’

Napoleon took hold of Illya’s hands and massaged the palms, which helped with the urge to scrape at himself.

‘We can go home if you like.’

Illya shook his head stiffly. ‘No. I have to learn to control this.’

‘It’s still so early, love. You don’t have to. This is the first attack you’ve had today. You’re doing so well.’

Illya thought of the other times he had so nearly succumbed today, but he supposed that the fact Napoleon had never known was a success in itself. He stood up, breathing in and out very deliberately, anchoring himself in the here and now by looking into Napoleon’s eyes. Napoleon must have read his determination in his gaze, because he patted his shoulder and nodded.

‘All right. Are you ready to go back down?’

Illya glanced at the door and smiled wanly at the thought of re-entering the room. ‘They must think I’m insane.’

Napoleon shook his head quickly. ‘They don’t,’ he promised. ‘They know what you went through. Everyone understands.’

They didn’t really understand. Illya knew that. They sympathised and they felt terrible for him, but they didn’t understand. Napoleon was probably one of the closest to understanding in the world; Napoleon and Dr Bainbridge; but even they hadn’t been through what he had been through. But they tried. That was the main thing. They were a net around him, waiting to catch him when he fell.

He nodded at Napoleon’s words, and got up stiffly. Napoleon kissed him on the forehead, and then Illya walked back down the stairs independently, holding the rail and keeping his head up. The others were talking together, and although they looked up as he returned there was no fuss and no solicitous questions. Illya chose a rather more out of the way seat this time, between the fire and the Christmas tree, and just sat there while the conversation ebbed and flowed, happy to be out of the action but still present. He was glad he hadn’t let Napoleon take him home, glad he had come here to sit by the crackling fire and smell the fresh pine scent and watch the snow drifting onto the balcony outside. The sedative was starting to take effect, calming the tightness and the urge to fidget and he just sat and watched the people around him.

  


((O))

  


Jim turned from his subtle scrutiny of Illya and took Napoleon by the elbow, leading him casually out onto the balcony, where the air was cold enough to take the breath away. He noticed that Illya’s eyes watched them all the way out through the glass doors, and lingered on them as they stood there. He lit a cigarette, and looked out at the sparkling lights that penetrated the thickening droves of snow. The buildings on the other side of the river were almost invisible now. A few lights shone from boats out on the water.

‘I wouldn’t fancy it in this weather,’ he commented, nodding towards the boats.

Napoleon looked at him appraisingly. ‘You’re a navy man, aren’t you?’

Jim nodded economically.

‘Do you keep a boat?’

‘Yeah, a twenty-footer. Sailboat.’

Napoleon smiled, moving closer to the wall of the balcony to look out over the river, although he was shivering. Jim opened up a locker and handed the man a blanket, which he put gratefully around his shoulders.

‘I’ve got a thirty foot sloop out on Long Island,’ Napoleon commented. ‘The  _ Pursang _ . I don’t get the chance to sail her much these days, but I can’t seem to let go.’

‘Well, it’s hard to let go of freedom like that. Of the water,’ Jim murmured.

‘I’d like to take Illya out on her again,’ Napoleon said. His eyes stayed on Jim as if making a challenge of the statement. ‘You know, he was a navy man himself. Other side, of course.’

‘Of course,’ Jim smiled. ‘You should take him when the weather’s better. He’ll enjoy it.’

The slightly defensive posture relaxed from Napoleon’s shoulders, and he said laughing, ‘Only if it’s calm. He gets seasick.’

Jim grinned. But then he looked directly at Napoleon and sobered. ‘You know, I always feel that a mission that damages an agent too far is a mission failed. How is he, Napoleon?’

Napoleon glanced in through the door. Barney had seated himself near Illya and was speaking to him. Illya was smiling and replying, gesturing with both hands, and for a moment Jim saw just what it was that entranced Napoleon about him. There was no one more heterosexual than Jim Phelps, but Illya had a certain fire and intensity and exotic delicacy about him that was certainly alluring. At least, he could see how someone that way inclined could be attracted to him.

‘I don’t think you have cause to feel the mission failed. Permyakov’s out, isn’t he?’ Napoleon said, keeping his eyes on his partner, as if his gaze were a kind of shield against harm. ‘Illya did his job.’

‘Yeah, Permyakov’s out, and he’s already been of great help to our scientists. And Lagoshin and his friend are settled up in Chicago. They’re taking English lessons and the friend already has a job. Janitor, I think. They’ll work their way up as they adapt. But I’m sorry that Illya had to be exposed to so much. How is he?’ he asked again.

Napoleon shrugged. He still didn’t take his eyes from his view of the Russian through the door. ‘He’s getting there,’ he said. ‘A week and a half of counselling has helped. That was the first episode he’s had today. Earlier on he was having five or ten a day – and night.’ He rubbed a hand tiredly over his forehead, obviously remembering with a good deal of weariness. ‘The psychiatrist is confident that he’ll be able to get back to the job eventually.’

Jim relaxed a little. He had hated to think that he had destroyed one of U.N.C.L.E.’s best agents, and such a man as Illya Kuryakin. ‘How long?’ he asked.

‘That depends on Illya. He might be back in the office part time in a month. They’ll assess for fieldwork regularly after that time. But I’ve never known anyone stronger than Illya. I’m confident he’ll make it.’

Jim glanced again at the thin figure in the cosy arm chair. Illya had hitched his legs up under him and was still talking to Barney intently about something. The pair were a good match, with their shared interests in science and engineering. Silently he agreed with Napoleon. He couldn’t imagine another man who would have been strong enough to volunteer for that duty and go through that experience and come out successful, even if he did bear terrible scars. It was a huge relief that he probably hadn’t ruined one of Waverly’s agents for life.

‘I’m sorry, Napoleon,’ he said, putting his arm around the man’s shoulders and squeezing. He had apologised to Illya, but he felt Napoleon deserved the same, considering the nature of their relationship. ‘I’m sorry for all the pain this has caused you, the  _ two _ of you, I mean. I hope you both come through this.’

‘We will,’ Napoleon said, and there was fire in his voice. ‘We will come through it. I’ll get the Illya I know back.’

Jim patted him on the back, then took the stub of his cigarette from his mouth and crushed it into the thin drift of snow on the corner of the balcony.

‘Come on back inside,’ he said, recovering the blanket and putting it back in the locker. ‘It’s freezing out here.’

Napoleon grinned. ‘I thought you’d never ask.’


	10. Chapter 10

Trees were budding and some were in blossom, and there was a warm freshness in the air that made Illya feel as if he were coming alive. He had been coming back alive for months now. Two weeks ago Dr Bainbridge had told him confidently that he didn’t see the need to talk to him again except for occasional check-ins. Their next appointment was scheduled for a month’s time.

Over the past four months Illya had talked his entire being out on the couch in Bainbridge’s room, and he couldn’t think of a single new thing to say. The last time he had succumbed to a panic attack had been a month ago on a crowded subway car, and there had been none since. Even the nightmares were gone. His reflexes were perfect, his scores on the shooting range were unparalleled, and he passed a barrel of standard psychological tests. Just a week ago, Waverly had trusted a low-level mission to him and Napoleon, a mission involving peril and combat at a small Thrush installation in Idaho, and he had come through it without a single negative mark.

The memories would always be there, but they no longer had the power to control him.

In a rare burst of generosity, perhaps in response to the success of that single mission, Waverly had granted both him and Napoleon a week’s leave, and Illya had been insistent on taking it in Paris, for reasons he had yet to disclose to Napoleon. They had strolled through the parks, climbed the Eiffel Tower like any number of normal tourists, walked along the Seine, and spent a day searching for the haunts Illya had frequented while studying at the Sorbonne. Some of them were changed, some of them were gone; but a few were just the same as Illya remembered them. The old jazz club where he had first discovered his love of that music even had the same proprietor, who remembered Illya with effusive fondness.

But for Illya it had all been working towards this day. It had been a risk contacting his old friend in naval intelligence, but it was one that Illya felt he had to take, and in that way he had managed to be informed of the release and subsequent exile of one Ivan Vdovushkin, just two weeks ago. His heart had leapt at the news, and when Andrei had informed him that Ivan was choosing to live in France he had known that it was very, very necessary to see him.

He sat with Napoleon at a café table at the side of a wide boulevard, sipping at his coffee and hoping that his contact had done his job.

‘Illya, are you ever going to tell me what this is all about?’ Napoleon complained over his tall glass of beer. His shirt front was flaky with bits of pastry, and Illya reached out with a smile to flick them off with his handkerchief.

‘You have the patience of a two year old, Napoleon,’ he complained. He glanced around for the umpteenth time, cautious about being watched.

‘If I were that impatient I wouldn’t still be here,  _ mon ami _ ,’ Napoleon said tartly. He picked up his pastry and promptly showered himself in flakes again.

Then Illya saw something, and his face lit in a broad grin as he recognised the man walking along the pavement, weaving between pedestrians. Ivan was unbearably thin. He was walking with a limp, and his shorn head was covered with a trilby. His suit was excessively cheap, but clean. He was looking about cautiously, as if he didn’t quite trust the situation. But when Illya rose to his feet his jaw dropped, and then reformed into a smile to match Illya’s.

‘ _Bozhe moi_ , _bozhe_ _moi_ ,’ he uttered, opening his arms. ‘Ilyusha! You’re so changed, Ilya! You’re so well!’

Napoleon stared questioningly at Illya. Illya pushed aside his coffee, dropped some money onto the table, then rose to his feet to gather Ivan into a hug, pulling his head down to kiss him on both cheeks.

‘Let’s walk, Vanya. Let’s walk,’ he said in Russian. He felt as if his heart were trying to swell out of his chest with joy at seeing the man.

Napoleon looked between the two. ‘Hey, I don’t suppose we could find a shared language?’ he asked, with the pouting look that Illya so loved. Napoleon hated not to be the centre of attention.

‘Ivan, do you speak French?’ Illya asked him. ‘You don’t speak English?’

‘French,’ Ivan nodded, switching to that language. ‘No English.’

‘Napoleon is American,’ Illya explained quickly. ‘But he speaks French.’ He looked around again, nervous of watching eyes, and again saw nothing.

‘It’s all right,’ Napoleon assured him. ‘There’s no one.’

They walked towards the park just across the street and into the green and open spaces. Illya put his arm around Ivan’s waist, feeling the thinness of him under his hand through his clothes. He remembered how he had looked just two weeks after his escape. It was too soon to expect Ivan to have thrown off the gaunt look of the camps.

‘You  _ are _ eating?’ he asked, though.

Ivan grinned. ‘My friend, I’m eating as if there’s no tomorrow. Bread and more bread. Imagine that. But please, explain to me, Ilya. How are you here? How are you alive? They said you were killed, that you died in the snow?’

‘First,’ Illya said, ‘My name is not Ilya Leonidovich Lagoshin. My name is Illya Nikolayevich Kuryakin.’

‘Illya!’ Napoleon said, his eyes widening in shock, and Illya turned to him, deciding to explain to his partner in English, since it was easier for both of them.

‘Napoleon, I have had him thoroughly checked out by a trusted friend in Intelligence,’ he promised. ‘There are no risky connections. Ivan is a good man. I told you about him. He kept me alive in the camp. Please understand that.’

Napoleon looked rather hurt. ‘And you didn’t see fit to tell me any of this? I mean, meeting like this?’

‘Not until I knew it was all right,’ Illya shook his head. ‘I didn’t want to worry you.’ He switched back into French. ‘Vanya, I work for an international organisation,’ he said. ‘I had a job to do in the camp. And then I got out.’ It seemed simpler to keep the details as brisk as possible, despite his certainty that Ivan was no risk. ‘And  _ you _ got out too,’ he grinned, hugging Ivan again. ‘Oh, I am so, so glad you got out.’

Then he saw that Ivan was regarding him with a hint of suspicion, and his heart faltered.

‘What is it, Vanya?’ he asked.

‘I – thought you were like me,’ Ivan said awkwardly. ‘I thought you were – our way.’

‘Oh!’ The heaviness lifted in an instant. Grinning, he turned to Napoleon and kissed him full on the lips, slowly and languorously, letting his tongue taste each of Napoleon’s teeth. Napoleon was briefly startled, but he kissed back, his arms slipping around Illya’s body, holding him with his palm just a space above Illya’s curving buttock, just the way he loved. It wasn’t something he would dare do in New York, but here in a secluded park walkway in Paris everything was different.

‘You thought I was this way?’ Illya asked wickedly after the kiss, flushed and alive. Napoleon looked gobsmacked. ‘Oh, Vanya, I am, I promise you.’

The smile on Ivan’s face was genuine as he reached out a hand to Illya’s arm, then caught him into a hug, squeezing him with surprising strength. ‘I’m glad, Illya. Not, really, that it makes any difference, but I’m glad that wasn’t a lie.’

Illya felt an old heaviness entering his chest. ‘Very little of it was a lie,’ he said.

He hadn’t expected to feel so raw on seeing Ivan. Ivan had witnessed everything, as no one else had.

Napoleon put a hand on his arm, asking in English, ‘Illya, are you all right?’

He took in a deep breath, steadying himself. The wounds had healed over, but they were still sore when they were poked. But he hadn’t succumbed to panic in weeks, and he wouldn’t here, now, with Ivan safe and Napoleon next to him.

‘Yes, I’m all right,’ he said. He switched back to French. ‘Ivan, are you all right here? Do you have money, a place to live? Do you have a doctor?’

‘Miraculously,’ Ivan replied. ‘It’s as if I have a guardian angel. His name is Andrei. He said he was doing it for a friend – but I didn’t know the friend was you. I should have a job by next week, too.’

Illya’s heart lightened. What a good man Andrei was. He had explained almost nothing to him about the situation. It had been too risky. But still, he had done all this for Ivan, on trust.

They carried on walking through the park and into an avenue of ornamental cherry trees, which dropped petals like confetti when the wind breathed at their blossoms. Illya plucked petals from Napoleon’s hair and then from the brim of Ivan’s hat, and laughed when Ivan and Napoleon reached out simultaneously to do the same for him. Napoleon gallantly smiled and waved for Ivan to go ahead, although Illya could read the slight jealousy in his expression.

He leant closer to Napoleon and murmured in his ear in English, ‘Napoleon, Ivan was my friend. You are my lover.’

Napoleon straightened his tie with the air of a preening cockerel.

‘Vanya, tell me everything,’ Illya said, turning back to the Russian. ‘Tell me how it went for you. They let you out!’

Ivan smiled. ‘Finally they had no more excuse. My sentence ran out and they couldn’t find a reason to extend it. I’d been trying so hard to stay straight, and finally it worked.’ He grinned. ‘Could be they were just sick of my ugly face.’

‘I’m glad,’ Illya said, patting his arm. ‘I mean – not that you have an ugly face. I mean, you don’t have a – Oh – ’

He was suddenly awkward. Ivan was tall and gangling and especially because of his emaciation his face was not beautiful. But he was not ugly.

‘Never mind, never mind,’ Ivan grinned, hugging him with one arm. ‘Oh, Illya, you’ll be glad to know this. Kuznetsov died, not more than a few hours after you escaped. It was the strangest thing. They were felling a tree that afternoon. The logging captain had come back – you know, the half-German guy – hopping mad that you’d escaped, yelling at everyone so much he confused them. He told Sokolov and Orlov to fell one of the big trees and then he told Kuznetsov to work on some logs right in its way. And he saw the tree about to come over, and I think he was trying to push Kuznetsov out of the way, but maybe he was so distracted by the escape. I don’t know. He pushed Kuznetsov the wrong way, and the tree came down right on his head. Killed him instantly. I didn’t see the German after that day. I don’t know what happened to him.’

Illya stopped in his tracks, suddenly oblivious to the falling blossoms and the spring air. Jim had never said a word. He looked across and saw the same shocked look in Napoleon’s eyes that must be in his own. He had felt all along that Jim was not a man one would want to anger.

‘It was no more than he deserved,’ he said simply. It was a dangerous subject to linger on, either in words or thoughts, and Napoleon must have sensed that because he changed the subject rapidly, asking, ‘What kind of a job will you be getting, Ivan?’

Ivan looked jerkily away from Illya’s face. ‘Oh, nothing good,’ he smiled. ‘Labourer. I’m used to labour. But I’ll try to work back towards my old life. I was a teacher of children, you know. I don’t want to labour all my life.’

Illya regarded him earnestly, reminded again that he knew so little of this man.

‘You’ll make it,’ he said. ‘And, Ivan, if you need anything, if you find yourself in trouble, come to U.N.C.L.E. Paris. That is, the U N C L E, on Rue Flaubert.’ He gave a quick description of the front for the Paris branch, and explained the place’s function. ‘If you ask them to contact me in New York, they will.’

Ivan looked at him appraisingly. ‘So, Illya, an agent in New York. What a life you have...’

They walked in the park all afternoon, talking and thinking of the future. They took Ivan to another pavement café as evening fell and Illya bought him an enormous _croque_ _monsieur_ and half a litre of beer, and watched him eat the food with more delight than he took in his own. Napoleon had fed him so well in the last months he was in danger of becoming fat. And then they parted, and Napoleon and Illya walked back to their secluded hotel.

  


((O))

  


Illya was pensive and withdrawn in the hotel bedroom, and Napoleon was worried about him. He had been quiet ever since they had left Ivan at his lodgings, and Napoleon was afraid that the meeting had brought back too many memories. He could hardly believe that Illya had arranged it at all, but he had to believe that he had acted only with the greatest discretion, and only through contacts that he could trust entirely.

‘Hey, honey,’ he said eventually.

Illya was sitting at the desk in the room, and he jerked his chin off his hands and looked round, his gaze seeming to come back from far away.

‘I thought you’d stopped calling me that,’ he complained.

Napoleon smiled suggestively. ‘Well, you remember what I called you last time we were in Paris, huh,  _ pussycat _ ?’

Illya’s smile showed he remembered well, but he didn’t laugh. Napoleon pulled up a chair and sat facing him, his knees touching Illya’s thigh.

‘Do you think it was wise to meet your friend like that?’ he asked seriously.

Illya looked at him, his eyes sparkling. ‘Oh, it was wise,’ he said with great feeling. ‘It was hard, but it was wise. I would have always worried about him.’

Napoleon reached out to stroke a thumb down his lover’s cheek. ‘No one could have done what you did, Illya,’ he said with utter sincerity. ‘It –  _ astounds _ me to think of what you went through.’

Illya turned to smile at him, then took him by the hand and led him to the bed. He pulled Napoleon down onto the bedspread and gathered him in his arms, pressing his face against Napoleon’s chest. Napoleon stroked his hands down his back, kissing Illya’s neck and trailing his fingers down under his collar in a way that made his lover shiver. He slowly began to peel the clothes from him, until they both lay naked on the wide bed, skin against skin, just holding one another for a while.

Illya was still not able to bear the idea of receiving Napoleon during lovemaking, but he was certain that he would, one day. For now Napoleon was quite content to let Illya take him, and for Illya to stimulate him in every other way under the sun. He had never met a person more inventive in bed.

  


((O))

  


This time Illya took Napoleon with a soft growl, plunging into him with a fervour that was close on the edge of tears, before collapsing over him and just lying along the sweat-sheened heat of his body, the stickiness of Napoleon’s come between them. He kissed Napoleon’s chest and neck in tired little nibbles as he caught his breath, and then just lay there, hearing Napoleon’s heart under his ear as it slowed to a languid rhythm of ease. This warmth and this closeness were the most perfect things in the world. The feeling of total relaxation through his body was unparalleled. There was only one dark regret in the whole thing.

‘Oh, Napoleon, I wish I could let you – ’ he began.

Napoleon’s broad hand stroked the length of his spine, stopping in the hollow of his back just above his buttocks. ‘It doesn’t matter, Illya,’ he promised. ‘If one day you can, that would be lovely. But if you never do, it doesn’t matter. I promise you. This is enough.’

Illya shivered a little, and Napoleon scrabbled to drag the bedspread up over them both.

‘I suppose we should get in the shower,’ the American commented.

Now he was warm again Illya had no incentive to move.

‘Hmm, not yet,’ he murmured.

He closed his eyes in this safe place and tested his memories. He had talked about everything that had happened in the camp for so long, so many times, with Dr Bainbridge, that it all seemed like a tired folk tale, recited by the fire until it had lost almost all meaning. It wasn’t just the rapes; it was the horrific month in the cattle wagon, the constant near-starvation, the mistreatment, the cold, the exhausting work, the dehumanisation, the fear of death. All of those things had crowded like demons in the dark, like little nightmares trying to deconstruct his soul. But finally he felt at ease. He could draw back those memories and they were safe, blunt-edged, just a piece of the past. Only the memory of those penetrations still had the power to make him clench into himself and shake, but that power was fading too. One day he would be able to let Napoleon come into him, and the last demon would be gone.

He finally levered himself off Napoleon and took him into the shower, where they washed one another, and he took Napoleon in his mouth under the running water, taking care of his almost insatiable need. Then they dried and dressed and ordered dinner to the room, and sat in the bay window with their view of the Eiffel Tower in the distance, rising above the lower buildings around.

‘Back to normal tomorrow, I guess,’ Napoleon said with a long sigh of regret.

‘Yes,’ Illya replied. He couldn’t feel regret. He had been waiting for too long to be trusted again, and he thought the trial mission in Idaho had been enough to settle Waverly’s doubts.

As Illya forked the final remains of a sweet and crumbling roulade into his mouth, Napoleon’s communicator warbled, and he took it from his pocket with a roll of his eyes.

‘Uh, Mr Solo,’ came Waverly’s aged voice. ‘I trust you have Mr Kuryakin at your side.’

Illya grinned and nodded.

‘Er, yes, sir,’ Solo replied, his voice thick with suspicion.

‘Ah, good. It’s the last night of your holiday, isn’t it? Well, no need to pack, gentlemen. I’ve just had word through of a most diabolical Thrush plot to sabotage the cheese makers of France. So I want you both to – ’

Illya leant back in his chair listening to the unfolding plan with a feeling of deep satisfaction. This was the way life should be.


End file.
